We passed 5000km / 3107 miles today! When we did the first rough plan for our tour from St. Andrews to Odessa, we estimated that the whole trip would be about this much. But that plan did not include Rome or all the kilometers that following bike routes instead of main roads bring. So now we are still about 1000km from Odessa, and, by now, we are very unlikely to go there.
Anyway, today was great! My wounds from the fall are healing well and are hurting less, and I can almost hold on to the handlebar as usual again. The route was nice, too, with mostly smooth riding and not too much traffic, and finally we met Manuel and Augustin, two French cycle tourers doing the Eurovelo 6 from Budapest to Constanta.
We started early, hitting the road by 8.00. The ferry from Banatska Palanka to Ram runs only every three hours, and we really wanted to catch the 10.30 ride. We also changed the route to follow mostly the main road to make the arrival time more predictable and realistic. The road was very nice and with little traffic, so we managed to average about 25km/h / 15.5 mph for the first 35km.
Then we turned off the road and followed the embankment of the Danube-Tisa canal, which was a bumpy, 4km dirt-road to the ferry. But it was easy to forget the bumpyness watching the Sunday morning fishing groups, and the grazing cows and sheep.
There were already many cars and pedestrians waiting for the ferry, and then two fellow cycle tourers! We started talking to Manuel and Augustin and they have spent five days on the road so far from Budapest, and also have Constanta as a goal, but were on a more ambitious 100km (62miles) per day timeline.
We continued cycling together with Manuel and Augustin, and I had a good conversation with Manuel who is studying economics and did an internship at the World Bank in Washington, DC. We discussed nationalism rising in Europe and the USA, and how it can be used as a smokescreen to distract from a country’s economic (or income inequality) problems. He also recommended two speeches to me to listen to, both of which he analyzed in a rhetorics class: Barack Obama’s 2008 speech on race in America, and Martin Luther King’s I’ve been to the mountaintop, his last speech before he was killed. We listened to the former over dinner and were feeling nostalgia for a president who was able to form complete English sentences.
We rode together to Vinci, where we stopped for some cold Radlers (beer and lemonade mix, about 2% ABV), nice homemade sausages, and a swim for Liz and Augustin.
Rather full from the big lunch, we cycled on to Golubac where it was time to say goodbye to Manuel and Augustin as they were planning to cycle another 60km (37 miles) before nightfall, and we had to buy salad and bread for dinner (we only had another 5km (3 miles) to go from Globulac.
At the guest house, we sat with the host’s father for a bit, who only spoke Serbian, but offered us delicious homemade cherry juice mixed with soda, some peach schnapps, and fresh figs from their tree.
We were not sure if we should ride along the Bulgarian or the Romanian side of the Danube to the Black Sea, so checked some reports from other people on the internet, and the bottom line is that after passing the Iron Gates (which we will do tomorrow), the roads are not really along the Danube and rather boring until the Danube delta. So we are considering a big pivot away from our goal of reaching the Black Sea, and turning north toward the Transsylvanian Alps or Southern Carpathians, which are likely more interesting, landscape-wise. Oh, and the castle inspiring Dracula is also somewhere there. We’ll decide tomorrow!
Total distance/elevation to date: 5018km/41’350m
Rest days: 18
Route and Stats
Relive Video
The 1948 Tour 
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