Offline and Just Fine: A 2025 Ryzon Off Grid Report

Additional photos by Marie Baab

Since purchasing my first iPhone, I’ve never turned it off for more than a few minutes. Let alone days in a row. I use it constantly, for just about anything, rather mindlessly, often assuming its existence in my right pocket or mounted on my handlebars. It’s there whenever I think I need it, waiting patiently to light itself up in front of my eyes, providing an infinite flow of information. Maps, messages, memes; a merciless and mesmerizing amount of material to keep me amused and on track. Somehow, this is a totally normal thing we all live with—either in ourselves or around us—leaving only our own capacity to self-rely as a boundary from tapping away on the screen that forever satiates our need for distraction. So, the act of turning off my phone, having it packed in wrapping paper and heat-sealed in a plastic bag, was perhaps the only way to kickstart a trajectory that would, somewhat forcefully, allow me to reflect on this exact behavior.

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I spent the last five days bikepacking from Cologne, Germany, to a little campsite just west of Amsterdam, in the Netherlands, with zero digital assistance. No bike computer, no phone, not even the compass I was handed at the starting line. Adding to this lack of tools that would’ve otherwise informed my brain about every twist and turn along the way, I did so with someone whom I’d met only days before, on a two-hour FaceTime call that barely provided an outline of the person I’d get to know during this particular undertaking. Still, it was enough to know that Ben, whom I’d be spending all this free time with, was participating for similar reasons. This concept of complete disconnection, first dreamt up and tried by a small team of eager Germans, was meant to be an intrepid attempt to try what most of our parents would deem business as usual: navigating with your eyes, inner instinct, and perhaps a paper map. It’s offline cycling culture, just the way your elders secretly hoped you’d learn to travel someday.

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Ben and I both savored this idea immensely, knowing it would hand us a chance at trying, and potentially cleansing our imagination of bike travel as a whole. He’d not really wild camped. I don’t often travel fast. He rides in bibs, and I feel like I barely fit in them. This merged our differences like a flat pedal with a clipped-in side—able to do both regardless of preference.

The morning our phones got sealed up by the Ryzon team, at their contemporary store in a lively neighborhood of downtown Cologne, nobody had actually been told where we’d have to ride to. Part of this experience was the thrill of having to creatively solve your route without guidance, and not knowing where the end point was made all 28 of us grin with an almost juvenile excitement. Quickly glancing over a straight line indicating a radius of a reasonable 400 kilometers from the city, it was perfectly possible that we’d end up in France, or near the Alps, but also the Dutch coast or somewhere along Germany’s northern shores. Here in this quiet street, where nearby chestnut trees popped their spring colors as though they’d absorbed the same drugs consumed underneath them, time trembled towards that revealing moment when we’d finally know where the sun would guide our paths. As soon as the last screen had been turned off and put to bed in a wrapper, each team received an envelope. In it, a card read an address, a country, and a row of coordinates—a street in Velsen-Zuid, somewhere in the lowlands of my home country of the Netherlands. I’d never heard of it.

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To compensate for my topographical ignorance, Ben and I decided the best course of action would be to follow the Rhine River, heading north, and figuring out where this obscure town hid from us once over the border between Germany and the Netherlands. We decided against the compass, paper maps, or asking passersby for their phone and instead to trust our intuition, landmarks, and signs along the way. We’d wild camp in the tents we’d brought along, eat out or chomp down supermarket food, and make as much distance as we could between sunrise and sunset, using every last sliver of daylight. Ben has a background in bike racing on the amateur level and commutes 80 kilometers a day, so a quick execution was somewhat expected of me, but knowing my preference for a uniquely slow form of bikepacking, I’d gently made him aware of my shortcomings in the sport. After all, this wasn’t a race, but a ride to savor deeply, with all your senses on and your brain dialed to full problem-solving mode.

As with all tours I’ve ever ridden on my bike, the first kilometers are the complete opposite of how the rest of the ride ends up flowing. I forgot my lock keys, we backtracked to Ryzon, looked for an ATM for cash, and I hastily tried to remember the PIN codes I’ve not used since Apple Pay became a thing. Did we pack enough snacks and water? Could we agree on which streets to follow to the Rhine? Would we ride on if the weather turned for the worst? To each of our encouragement, the ride actually just eased into our legs, and before we knew it, we were riding by the banks of the river, already deep in conversation about the sort of things strangers discuss to get to know each other. The Kölner Dom waved us goodbye from a distance, and after a few detours and dead ends, we discovered the network that would assist us on our way north. Spanning all along the Rhine lies a collection of leisurely bicycle routes, and instead of being told what to do by our phones or bike computers, we decided this would guide us to the Netherlands. Always heading north, the river on our right, we’d get there.

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Already getting jokey, we tracked down a place for lunch, talked about my love for dogs and Ben’s love for his son, cycled on and on along the river banks, catching spring whiffs of flowers and tall, vibrant green grass in the afternoon sun, mixed with a noxious concoction of contrasting ones while passing large industrial complexes situated on the water. Following bicycle routes in Germany proved difficult because of such areas we needed to ride around, as well as the many little detours we had to undertake as the directions swayed through and mixed with residential neighborhoods, countryside roads with semi-heavy car traffic, and construction sites blocking our way completely. What would’ve been easy to fix with a few taps in a mapping app now came down to asking people along the way, making conversation with dog walkers, and relying on our own internal compasses. For fun, anytime either of us would suggest a way that’d result in a dead end, we’d subtract imaginary points from our individual scores. Ben and I got along just fine.

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Neither of us owned a watch, so time passed in a strange way as we pedaled the kilometers away into the afternoon. With an early rise and late set, the sun facilitated an immensely long day of riding. Just before it dipped behind the horizon that day, we tracked down some cold supermarket food and tucked ourselves off the road before Rheinberg, jumping over high grass until we hid ourselves from view behind a row of high trees and foliage. The frogs sang under the pastel colors of dusk, and we set up our tents. Whereas Ben excels in riding long hours, I excel in wild camping, and I entered swiftly into my element. He pitched his ultralight contraption over his bike and struggled a little to settle into the thought of sleeping so exposed. I told him my many tent anecdotes as we ate together in my vestibule and calmed down from the long first day. So much energy had been expended, yet none of it rewarded any sort of algorithm. Instead, our brains just kept the gifts to themselves.

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As it took Ben a fair amount of time to pack up his tent the next morning, I set out to find a cafe in town to quench my appetite for coffee. But when you can’t tell each other where you are, this could mean losing each other entirely. Besides, if I’d known that businesses opened as late as 9:00, and that it was only 7:00 by the time I rode all hopeful into Rheinberg, I’d have turned back earlier. We caught each other near the town sign and brushed off the slight misunderstanding of location by riding fast up to Kleve. I noticed that Ben really liked making distance in the morning, and it grew on me. Sheltering behind him, in his wind shadow, we each put in some effort to either speed up or slow down. It was one of the first times I’ve felt lucky to have a headwind. Once we’d pushed for a few hours, the border of the Netherlands presented itself, adorned with its glorious red bike lanes and road islands meant to slow down drivers. I couldn’t help but feel proud of all that’s been done to improve the lives of people outside of cars since the 1960s here, and Ben was just as enthusiastic about it.

Honoring our strategy, we found both a postman and a post office in the following kilometers, and they presented contradicting perspectives. Velsen-Zuid appeared to be a place simultaneously situated north and south of Amsterdam, but my gut sided with north as soon as someone mentioned the large steel factory by the west coast. We were only just over the border, but having cycled a good amount of the Netherlands in my day and feeling confident, I decided we’d head a little west, slowly curving north to Utrecht and eventually, Amsterdam. But not before I bonked out by the side of a dike shortly after, eventually relying on nothing but a deep gulp of cola to make it to a random campsite near Tiel. To our surprise, other teams had arrived here and already set up camp, after following a somewhat diagonal itinerary between Cologne, Venlo, and this little campsite under the Dutch sun. Jan, the campsite host, offered us all a welcome drink, and we gathered inside the barn for a proper evening of contemplation, pizza, and alcohol-free beer.

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Waking up to Ben already packing his tent (and getting better at it), the sky was busy preparing a blend of sunshine and rain for us. I journaled and reflected on the day that had passed while the campsite cat stroked my tired legs. Receiving no input from alarms, messages, notifications, and the like had made these early hours strangely tranquil, just like all the ones since Cologne. When you’re disconnected like that, and you break the habit of reaching for your phone the second you need to wait for something, or prevent yourself from relying on your screen and subsequently still getting dragged into these constant distractions, it’s as if every moment tastes a little better. My pen brushed the pages lightly, the cold temperature crept up my tight, unwashed bibs, and rays of sun warmed my torso. Having Snickers on toast that morning due to a closed supermarket could’ve probably been prevented, but somehow the subtle hint of Silk Road Mountain Race desperation tasted bittersweet.

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Ben and I sheltered in an Aldi and a random bike shack by someone’s farm driveway, dodged giant, looming rain clouds by riding in between them, and got to our first ferry of the trip. Countryside roads through rivierenlandschap guided us nearly all the way up to Utrecht, a large and historic city situated on the edge of the Randstad, the conglomeration of the Netherlands’ biggest cities and a sort of all-encompassing business and university district. A chance to try the famous kroket for lunch awaited us in a hip cafe, where once again another team linked up with us. It was so much fun to be completely unaware of each other’s locations, unable to track them down, and to then stumble upon each other at these sorts of places for a pause.

While we savored our meals, a young waitress showed interest in what we were up to, and after her face lit up from our stories, she recognized the end destination’s name and confirmed its northern heading. A canal was all we needed to follow up to Amsterdam and, from there on out, we’d just have to find the west coast. Feeling flush about our progress, we decided we’d camp the night north of Amsterdam, out in the meadows just east of the city, to see the city still asleep the following day. As we crossed Amsterdam’s eastern manmade islands, seeing the urban horizon exchange itself for flatlands, the evening light adorned our sunset ride in dramatic colors. As we finally set up our tents on the waterfront of the campsite, the wind disappeared, and night fell fast. Apparently, Ben spoke to me from his tent, but I’d already drifted off to sleep.

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I awoke to a spectacular and rather short-lived sunrise with puffy eyes, washed off by the brisk ride through Amsterdam’s canal belt. The streets were eerily quiet, and it took us over an hour to find breakfast. Clearly, Friday night had been a rough one, judging by the sheer amount of trash that lined the streets. Another ferry crossing later, we entered the hip NDSM wharf west of the city, ready to indulge in a bakery. People came and went, but while simply observing the modern behavior of those around us, having not touched a screen for four days, one scene stood out in particular. A man across from us held his phone so mindlessly, while his hand got caressed by his partner’s in an attempt for connection, it made us realize what we’d signed up for. Here we were, present, available, satisfied, and grateful. Somehow, the high of bike travel is complemented tremendously by the high of being present without digital distractions. And learning to apply that to our lives off the bike received a whole new kind of priority then and there.

Still in awe, the rain refreshed us in our last hour of riding, before we stumbled upon the ferry to Velsen-Zuid. Just minutes after disembarking, thanks to the clear-cut directions of an elderly woman waiting to board the ferry on the other side of the canal, we found ourselves standing under the inflatable arch marking the finish.

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With a little help, we’d done it. The way, the journey, and our symbiosis took just four days, but it felt like something far larger than that. A bubble so colorful, it was hard to pop. Our phones unpacked, yet voluntarily kept off, we indulged in an evening of celebration for the books. And I couldn’t help but wonder when I can do this again.

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