Bulgaria has proved harder than we thought.
Basically it is very easy to create a really interesting fortnight’s cycling around beautiful and/or interesting and/or physically challenging bits of Bulgaria.
And it is really hard to find a Sid-and-Doris-proof six or seven day route diagonally across the country.
We have to start in Vidin, because that is where we are.
And we have to end in Edirne because we are still determined to go to Istanbul (although occasionally asking ourselves why we didn’t set an easier target, like get to Budapest “Wow! You cycled all the way to Budapest? That’s awesome!” and then turn left for the Croatian coast and a nice holiday). And a very nice bunch of Istanbul cyclists have given us a backroad route from Edirne to Istanbul which finishes on a local ferry down the Bosphorus.
And we’d like to do it in a way that doesn’t destroy our legs with the hills, or our heads/bodies by putting us down stupidly large roads with trucks, or take ages because we are going round the edge.
So the blue arrow shows our current plan, which has taken a great deal of time to work out, so please only be very complimentary about it.
We are going to cycle from Vidin to Pleven on Saturday and Sunday, to get used to the roads here without commercial traffic. Then tomorrow night in Pleven we have a choice of different routes over the Beeg Eels depending on what we have seen so far.
Oh and by the way there is not much accommodation in the Beeg Eels and they are too hard to do in a single day but I suppose you have guessed that anyway.
