The big balkan cycle adventure

Day 20 (already).Today the road will bring us to Shuaia (not to be confused with Ushuaia), a small village in the middle of nowhere along the Danube. It was either staying in Shuaia, 120 K, or in Giurgi a town 80 K further. 200 K is to much for Black Horse….for me it would have been fine.  After a great Romanian breakfast, I continued the road from yesterday. Same small farming villages, scenery, road and waving  friendly people. Another 2 day’s before I will arrive in Rouse a considerable city in Bulgaria. I’m looking forward to leave the countryside for some time. I started today, a somewhat morbid, counting game. Counting the number of road killed dogs…..I know. Since a couple of days I noticed that there are quite some roadkilled animals. Today I counted 12 roadkilled dogs (relatively recent). Cats and other animals (fox, birds, rabbit) I counted 19 roadkilled animals. The volume of (wild) dogs in Romania is very high. I think that every family has at least 1 dog. Mostly t...

Today I left Bulgaria again for Romania. Bulgaria had a little nutrional  surprise for me : when I was searching breakfast in the city I noticed that at 8 in the morning the pizza stalls were open (I counted 4). When I entered a bakery, which did also sell pizza, most customers (mostly childern with their parents) queuing before me ordered a slice of pizza with mayo and ketchup as topping…Maybe it was national pizza day and  having pizza with mayo/ketchup in the morning does not belong to the standard Bulgarian breakfast menu….I ordered some pastry and headed for the border. As cyclist I had to take another road then the truck lined highway. Yesterday my guess was that the line was 10 K. I had to cycle 15K in parallel to the truck line so expect that the waiting line was more then 15 K. The Vidin-Calafat bridge opened in 2013, before the trucks crossed the border by ferry at a capacity of 5 trucks per ferry every 30 minutes (in reality the capacity was much lower).  Not s...

I needed to cycle only 65 K today, from Nigotin to Vidin, a small city near the border with Romania in Bulgaria. So I stayed in bed until 8.30, made an espresso and sat on the terras of my chalet-studio. Bojan, the owner/host, promised me he would arrange breakfast around 8.30. Around 9.00 he brought me a filo based  pastry filled with a green vegetable (which I did not know) and cheese, real espresso and some fresh orange based limonade/juice. All was perfect again, totally in line with the level of service received since I arrived at Bojan’s place. After breakfast I slowly packed and was ready to roll around 10.15. Bojan asked if he could join me to the border and taking me via a route through the hills to the border. I happily accepted. I was somewhat surprised that for my stay, the welcome beer and breakfast the cost was only 14 euro. I would have paid without any questioning the double.  The plan was to go to Vidin, Bulgaria , and tomorrow follow the Romanian Eurovelo 6 r...