A Minnesota man's biking dream is cut short in Iran as he flees the Israel-Iran conflict
The 32-year-old from Minnetonka, Minnesota, said he did not expect to get caught up in what looked like a real war zone. He fled to neighboring Azerbaijan on Monday.
'The bombs started falling,' Andersen said Wednesday, speaking to The Associated Press over Zoom from a hotel in Baku, Azerbaijan's capital. 'It was extremely scary.'
Andersen was on a yearslong, personal mission to cycle across all seven continents. He had been touring Iran with a local guide, which is a must for U.S. visitors to Iran, and sharing videos of his journey with tens of thousands of his social media followers since the beginning of the month.
On Friday — "the day the bombs started falling' — they were on the road from the town of Chalus, on Iran's Caspian Sea coast, driving south to the capital of Tehran, where Andersen hoped to apply for a visa to Afghanistan, with the goal of crossing into Central Asia and eventually Russia.
'It was really just, like, the worst timing possible,' Andersen said.
They sheltered in place and decided to speak Spanish so no one would suspect Andersen's American identity. He saw long lines of cars on the road fleeing Tehran. Family, friends and social media followers were worried for him.
Eventually, the U.S. State Department sent Andersen an email advising him to leave for Azerbaijan or Turkey. With his VPN blocked, a friend in Los Angeles applied for an Azerbaijani visa on his behalf, which was granted with emergency approval from the U.S. Embassy in Baku.
Andersen said the circumstances made him abort his biking plan — at least for now. To have kept going would have been 'a little nutty,' he said.
'I was crazy for going in there in some people's eyes in the first place,' Andersen said. 'And then getting out I think was the safe, smart choice at that point.'
For now, his plans are up in the air as he considers what to do next. Some time ago, he'd traded his job back home, working as a project manager at a construction company, to bike the world.
Biking was his dream, his escape, Andersen said, adding that he had struggled in the past with addiction and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.
'Maybe I was a bit naive,' he said but added that he doesn't regret the trip.
'There's always going to be a risk, and you have to accept it,' he said.
Andersen said he plans to take a ferry across the Caspian Sea to Kazakhstan, and then bike east into Uzbekistan.
"But I don't know where to go from there,' he said.
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Atlantic
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- Atlantic
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Newsweek
40 minutes ago
- Newsweek
Donald Trump Grades His Meeting With Vladimir Putin as a 10 of 10
Based on facts, either observed and verified firsthand by the reporter, or reported and verified from knowledgeable sources. Newsweek AI is in beta. Translations may contain inaccuracies—please refer to the original content. President Donald Trump on Friday lauded his bilateral summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin, telling Fox News host Sean Hannity that he would rate the meeting as a 10 out of 10. Why It Matters Trump and Putin met Friday at Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson in Anchorage, Alaska, to discuss ending Moscow's war against Ukraine, which Putin launched in February 2022. The White House said the Russian leader reached out to request the meeting, to which Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky was not invited. What To Know "If you had to grade it on a scale of 1 to 10?" Hannity, arguably one of Trump's staunchest supporters in the conservative media sphere, asked the president during a prime-time broadcast Friday following the Trump-Putin summit. "So I think the meeting was a 10 in the sense that we got along great," Trump replied. "And it's good when two big powers get along especially when they're nuclear powers. You know, we're number one, they're number two in the world and that's a big deal ... you never even want to mention that word. The word 'nuclear.'" The American president went on to say that the ball is now in Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky's court, though he declined to say whether the Russian leader had made any concessions during the three-hour summit. On the Ukrainian side, meanwhile, there was little hope for progress following the Trump-Putin talks. Putin "won the informational war," Oleksandr Merezhko, chair of the foreign affairs committee in the Ukrainian parliament, told The New York Times. He added that Putin repeated his talking points during joint remarks with Trump after the summit, saying, "I don't see any changes." This is a breaking news story. Updates to follow.
