Route Update

Riding on the coat-tails of Will’s super awesome post (he’s right—you should donate!), I thought I’d take the cue from his “I’d update you, but I can’t because I don’t know what’s going on” and fill you in a bit (at least, that’s how I understood it.  Did you not get the same meaning?).

So, it turns out that we are traveling in Europe during the years of the great train expansion… meaning that a lot of the trains we were going to take don’t actually exist anymore.  For example, there are no trains running to Istanbul at this point, because they’re doing a major re-haul of the Istanbul train station to make way for high-speed trains.  This means that in another three years, train travel in Turkey is going to be awesome.  Right now, it means we have a huge distance to cover without a train.  Oh, and if that wasn’t enough, it turns out that right now Greece isn’t really doing international trains… which makes connecting the dots a little tricky.

So you may be asking yourself (quite justifiably): what’s the plan?  After all, if we’re asking you to donate per mile, you might what to know exactly what those miles will be.

At this point, what seems most likely to work is to take a ferry across the Black Sea to Bulgaria.  From there, we’ll probably take a train to Sofia, bike across the border of Serbia to Nis, take a train to Belgrade, the capital of Serbia, then either take a train to Zagreb, Croatia or bike to Zagreb, Croatia… it depends on where we decide to do the majority of our biking.  The variation of this is to bike along the Danube, Europe’s second-longest river.  Apparently this river makes a wonderful bike trail that is highly popular in Europe… so, depending how much work we want to do planning-wise, we might hop on the well-traveled route for a bit, or we might break our own ground.

Now, I know when I first started reading about going to Serbia, my thoughts were along the lines of “that doesn’t seem like a safe idea…”  However, put your minds at ease:  according to all the extensive research I have done (and it actually is quite extensive… now that my projects are over and school is out, I have quite a bit of time on my hands), Serbia is a wonderfully friendly place to bike. 

Of course, this may (and, in fact, probably will) change again before we actually leave.  However, that’s the thinking at the moment.  We’ll keep you posted.