Bikepacking For Stem Cells

I'm Alice and with me in this picture is my husband Žiga. We’re cycling from our home in Slovenia to the UK as a fundraiser for Anthony Nolan and Southampton Hospitals Charity.

We want to contribute towards the advancement of blood and bone marrow cancer treatment and to raise awareness about how to become a stem cell donor in homage to my dad Ben.

This September marks ten years since Dad passed away, so we decided to do something positive and impactful to celebrate his life. We will leave Slovenia on August 3rd and hope to arrive in Southampton on September 2nd, Dad’s birthday. This month on the road will be a chance to take stock of the milestone, share stories, and be in the moment, one pedal moving after the other -- it’s an adventure my dad would have been overly excited about.

Dad was a music lover. In the film of his life, the soundtrack would be Pink Floyd and Neil Young, Cat Stevens and Tom Waits, Ry Cooder and Leonard Cohen. He played his music loud because he was a farmer and didn't have neighbours for most of his life and because music brought him great happiness. He instilled the power of music in me and my brother.

He was a cheeky son and supportive sibling, a rebellious teenager, a loving husband and father, a farmer and then a builder and then a renovator, an inventor, and finally a fighter against cancer.

He was a brave man that lived an active life and asked a lot of his body for as long as possible. He was creative, quirky to say the least, flawed like all of us, loving, and determined to the end.

Dad had bone marrow cancer and was treated for this for almost five years. It is more common to get his cancer as a secondary cancer and as an older person. He was in his mid-40s and his cancer was pretty advanced so Dad was an unusual case. Because of this, the doctors agreed to give treatment a go despite how advanced the cancer was and Dad became part of a body of research run by Kim Orchard at Southampton General Hospital.

He fought bloody hard. But that’s not always enough.

When you have a stem cell transplant, the old bone marrow has to be stripped out with chemo and then stem cells are used to grow new, hopefully healthy marrow. Like with any other transplants, you need a donor match. With stem cells, it’s very unlikely to have a match within your family. That’s where Anthony Nolan steps in. A transplant is statistically more successful when the donor is between the age of 16 and 30, so they work really hard advocating and speaking to young audiences to get them signing up to their stem cell donor register. This register helps patients in the UK and abroad. Anthony Nolan also do lots of research and provide support for patients and their families.

Anthony Nolan found Dad a donor in a number of weeks, and his donor was so amazing that they donated more than once! We don’t know who they are but love them wherever they are.

Unfortunately, after the transplants, Dad’s condition got more complicated and he was in (mostly) and out of the Intensive Care Unit at Southampton General Hospital for his final years.

In the end, Dad was put into a medically induced comma to try and save him. We spent four or five days with him like this in Intensive Care. The number of days is a blur now. Mum, my brother Jack, and me were allowed to stay and sleep at the hospital during this time. The staff at Southampton were phenomenal in their support and care of us as a family during that horrible time. Dad passed away on September 19th, just after his 49th birthday.

So me and Žiga are bikepacking from our hometown Maribor, in Slovenia, where we live and Žiga is from, to Southampton General in Dad’s memory.

Bikepacking is backpacking but with a bike, so you travel with everything on your bike. We will camp as we travel and use the bike community WarmShowers (a safe and enthusiastic community that offer a shower, a kitchen, sometimes a bed or a place to camp for touring bikers). We will keep it as simple as possible and make the journey a practice of ‘finding a place of empty space.’ This is something Dad told me got him through the boredom, fear, and uncertainty of his treatment. I think he meant that it is important to create moments of quiet simplicity in the face of negative thoughts. His saying is written across the chest of the bike jerseys I designed for this ride.

We will cycle from Slovenia into Austria, skirt around the Alps and head into Germany, drop into France in the direction of Paris, and then go down to St Malo, where we will take the ferry to my aunty Emma on Jersey. Then we’ll take the ferry again to Poole, and our final leg will be from Poole to Southampton General on the 2nd of September. I think we will get pretty close to 2000km by the end of our journey.

We’ve had some amazing sponsors involved with our ride. We literally wouldn’t be able to afford this without them so I want to thank them here. They are: Zeal Optics USA, a long-term sponsor of Žiga’s who make sunglasses and ski/ snowboard googles and who gave us glasses for the road AND are donating two pairs so we can have a raffle as part of our fundraiser; Žolna (meaning woodpecker) Sport, who made the bike jerseys we designed for this ride and for Žiga’s bike club; Freestyle Slovenia, our local bike shop, who helped us get Benjamina and Janet (our wonderful bikes); Tailfin UK, who make bike racks and bags that are literally totally silent and generally blooming amazing; Musguard Slovenia who gave us handlebar harnesses and mudguards for the wet days as well as a lot of excitement and enthusiasm when we met up with them in Ljubljana; Cycliq Australia, who make lights fitted with cameras so we can record the ride and keep safe; and finally, MET helmets who have given us the best carbon fibre helmets available and again shared mega enthusiasm about our projects.

Everyone listed above made our ride a reality. They trusted what we wanted to do and believed in our vision. We can not thank you guys enough for your support.

Fingers crossed, we will arrive on the 2nd September to host a birthday picnic for Dad. The following week we will join the London to Brighton charity ride for Southampton Hospitals Charity. And when we get home to Slovenia, we’re collaborating with our local hospital UKC Maribor and Slovensko Združenje Bolnikov z Limfomom in Levkemijo (Slovenian Association of Patients with Lymphoma and Leukaemia) to fundraise for static bikes for cancer patients here and for recovery programmes run by the association.

There’s loads of ways you can get involved and we’d really appreciate your support!

You can:

- donate to our fundraiser (the charities are listed separately at the bottom of this page, so you can support one that resonates with you or split your donation between the causes),

- donate to our London to Brighton ride for Southampton Hospitals Charity on through the Southhampton Team Member below,

- share this page with your community (friends, family, work) to help us spread the word,

- help me and Žiga personally cover our costs on the road through the website my Buy Me Coffee,

- follow us on Instagram @ziga.erlac and @scally.ali and on Facebook Ziga Erlac and Scally Ali, and share our posts with your community to spread the word!

Thank you for taking the time to read about our journey. Have a great day. Big love!

Alice and Žiga