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Dean Nicholson was pedaling up a hill in Bosnia, near the border of Montenegro, when he heard a plaintive meow.

He looked over his shoulder. In the lambent December light, he saw a gray-and-white kitten chasing him up the incline.

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The burly and bearded 31-year-old itinerant, with a thick Scottish brogue and a Maori design inked on his left upper arm, pressed on his brakes and dismounted.

Nicholson had set out three months earlier from his home in Dunbar, a town on the eastern coast of Scotland, to traverse the world on his green Trek 920 bike. He cycled from Scotland to England, hopped on a ferry to the Netherlands, and then traveled through Belgium, France, Switzerland and down to Italy. From the coast of the Adriatic, he caught a ferry to Croatia and then made his way into Bosnia.

He was seeking distance from his job as a welder, which had left him listless and depleted.

“I couldn’t do the 9-to-5 thing,” he said in an interview with The Washington Post. “I wanted to see the world and see what state it’s in.”