Orient Express 2012

A (planned) ride across Europe

An evocative name isn't it?   The journey from Paris to Istanbul has long excited the imagination of many and while the fabled train journey is now just an infrequent (and expensive!) shadow of it's former glory, there are equally exotic variants, like the annual cycling expedition organised by Tour d'Afrique – check out the 'More Information' link – but there's another way too, the EuroVelo 6

EuroVelo is a brilliant concept, a network of 12 long–distance cycle routes crossing Europe. The total proposed length is 60,000 km, of which more than 44,000 km are in place already. In theory, for a route to be part of EuroVelo it must:

º  have no gradient above 6%
º  be wide enough for two cyclists
º  have an average of no more than 1,000 motorised vehicles a day
º  be sealed for 80% of its length
º  be open 365 days a year
º  have
    »  provision points every 30 km
    »  accommodation every 50 km
    »  public transport every 150 km

Sounds really good doesn't it?   We'll see just how this applies, particularly in 'New' Europe...

Anyway, the idea is to ride from Paris, France to Istanbul, Turkey along much of the EuroVelo 6 route, but diverging to pass thru Sofia, Bulgaria – the blue path on the nice Google map above – rather than following the Danube River to the Black Sea – the red path on the map

While I'm ancient enough to love paper maps, I ve just got myself a bike GPS (Global Positioning System) – a Garmin Edge® 800 a bike computer/GPS – and for those of you with a bike GPS, here's an interactive map of the EuroVelo 6 route, the kmz file that goes with it can be downloaded from the 'More Information' link

 

Ain't Google good?

There seems to be little middle ground in cyclists views of using GPS, it seems that it's seen as either really good or really bad, but I'm going to give it a go anyway and using the kmz file that generated the Google map above, I plan on creating a path which will take me down country roads rather than highways – but if things go like my in–car GPS then I can expect a dead–end or three along the way...

In the meantime I'm learning about routes, tracks, waypoints and a whole heap of esoterica. There are plenty of places on the web to create/edit GPS routes/tracks, have a look at:

http://ridewithgps.com or
http://www.gpsvisualizer.com

and then there are the zillions of 'ride' collections like:

http://www.bikely.com

I don't do 'journals' and while this won't be a ride of almost mythical proportions like the Cairo to Casablanca ride I did in 2009, it's a journey that's said to be challenging and interesting so that means it might warrant some on–the–road updates, we'll see...   anyway, there's a 'journals' page link under 'More Information' – of course cos the ride is still a way off, there's not much there yet