I have had a few people ask me for more details on my route. When I first published this blog I had a post giving a rough guide of my route. It has changed quite significantly since. Below I have a map of the route I have followed from Zurich to Bucharest.

From Bucharest I hope to travel to Constanta on the Black Sea and from there I will do my best to hug the coast as I head South before crossing the Bosphorus straight into Istanbul.

I am not sure what perspective this maps gives. Here is a some additional data from my journey that offers a different perspective:

I have spent 136 hours, 4 minutes and 47 seconds on the go at an average speed of 19.4 km/h. I have cycled a total of 2638 kilometers, climbed a total of 9813.4 meters and descended 10180.8 meters. My maximum speed has been 70.8 km/h, the steepest gradient I have descended had a pitch of 39.8% and the steepest hill I have climbed had a 35.8% gradient. My average heart rate has been 124.9 bpm and it has topped out at 186 bpm. Here is a profile of the trip, with the vertical axis showing the altitude in meters above sea level and the horizontal axis measured in kilometers (intuitive I hope).

All this information has been the easiest thing to collect and analyse using my Garmin Colorade 300 and a nifty piece of software called Ascent from Montebello software. I’ll have more on this in a subsequent post.

This route is similar to the Eurovelo 6 route, but in many places it diverges as I have not the bikeline guides or other Eurovelo 6 maps. This I think has at times made my life unnessarily difficult, but it also means that I have been through villages and towns that few other cyclists normally travel.

When earlier this week I ran into a Swiss couple on recumbents having some tire trouble in Calafat, they told me that their guide offer the advice that the first 160km in Romania from Calafat to Corabia is the desert of Romania and worth simply traveling by train. Similarly their guide says that there is no shame in catching a train for the last 50km into Istanbul. I personally found the “desert of Romania” to be one of the most enjoyable parts of the trips with the warmest welcomes I have received from villagers yet and on occasion kids even giving me high fives as I passed by. I also think that having come so far, I will feel a sense of defeat if I don’t actually cycle into Istanbul.