Greenwood native cycling across Europe and Asia to break bread with locals

Next week, Amie Thao and her partner, Olli Tumelius, will begin cycling 15,000 miles across Europe and Asia, searching for good meals and good stories along the way. The 29-year-old Thao and 31-year-old Tumelius are calling their trek the International Supper Club.

Olli Tumelius and Amie Thao.
They will start at the western edge of Continental Europe and end at the eastern edge of Asia. Thao came up with the idea for the journey after cycling 5,000 miles across Europe in 2011, sharing meals with strangers along the way.
“My love of food and cooking led me to spend a lot of time in kitchens. Everywhere I went, I found that people were struggling with how to make meaning from their lives. Meal time is the perfect space to sit together and tell stories,” Thao said in her press release.

Amie and Olli ride their bikes in any kind of weather.
In an email exchange with PhinneyWood, Thao said she graduated from Greenwood Elementary School in 1993, and has fond memories of Top Ten Toys and the Greenwood Library. Her parents still live in the neighborhood.
The pair are soliciting funds through the crowd-funding platform Kickstarter, and were featured in that website’s Staff Picks as one of their favorite projects. The International Supper Club is trying to raise $7,500 for the trip.

Route map for the International Supper Club.
The pair will be posting stories of people they meet and regular updates of their trip on their website. You can also follow them on Facebook and Twitter. And you can see a short video of their project here.