I'm not sure if this is going to happen, and to be honest, I'm just gonna liquidate my sellables, get rugged up for the road, and get on the road anyway. I'll be dropping by steemit.com to share some snapshots of things I see along the way, when I find places to stop and get online. I'm selling my stuff tomorrow and kitting up and probably on wednesday morning early I'm setting off.
I have just been consulting with my fair compadres and doing the calculations and it's about 2000km from Sofia to Amsterdam. That means I would need to average about 66km/day. This is not unrealistic, and I can grab quite a nice selection of photos along the way as long as I repair my 20KmAh battery and find somewhere to charge it every few days to keep my phone running.
If I come up a bit short, I can always jump on a bus somewhere in Austria or Germany if I've managed to get enough votes to cover this...
I have sung the Unofficial Australian National Anthem for you all, in thanks for giving this wonderful opportunity to me:
I spent 15 months living in Amsterdam. I could probably even cover my one way ticket there easily if I liquidated my desktop computer. One of my fair compadres has a ticket for entry there, and another fine chap tells me that I win 1000SP if I validate my ticket, and that's good enough for me.
So, before I go further, I need to acquire a bicycle. I have watched many bicycle shops around Sofia, and I'm guessing I can probably get something competent for about 50-80 euros second hand. I need a beany, gloves, thermal undies and - well, I didn't even think of this, but do I need a helmet some of the way? Oh, and a sleeping bag. A winter one this time... last trip I had a summer one.
My route would be through Serbia, Hungary, Austria, Czech Republic, Germany and then the Netherlands.
I have a desktop PC I can probably liquidate for about 70 euros, it might even be enough for the bicycle. I have to check. I will go out and investigate this tomorrow. My landlord is about to finally close a sale on his property in Varna, and maybe he would sponsor me... to get me out of the house... since he's gonna bring in an army of renovators to finally get it up to standart.
I rode a Mussolini 1970s italian tank bicycle up from Rimini to just shy of the border, and then from the other side of the border of Slovenia in Nova Goritsa (new little wood, as in small forest) to Ljubljana, and then to Slovenska Bistritsa where I had a bad crash on a level crossing falling into a rail track, after which I jumped trains to Maribor and finally to the border where I walked until I was in Hungary.
If anyone wants to sponsor me to get the bicycle, thermals, bicycle helmet, I'm pretty keen to have a crack at doing the 2000km run from here to Amsterdam, and I should manage to get there in time to make entry to the SteemFEST.
I'll be a bit slow at first, it's been a while since I did so much riding. But I love riding, and I love Europe.
Edit
Since my good friend has offered me a ticket she won to go, I might just sell up and walk/hitch my way there anyway.
If I have a ticket for entry, I have to go!
In the immortal words of the late Big Kev: I'm Excited!
We can't stop here! This is Whale country!
Loki was born in Australia, now lives in Sofia, Bulgaria. IT generalist, physics theorist, futurist and cyber-agorist. Loki's life mission is to establish a secure, distributed layer atop the internet, and enable space migration.
I'm a thoughtocaster, a conundrummer in a band called Life Puzzler. I've flipped more lids than a monkey in a soup kitchen, of the mind. - Xavier, Renegade Angel
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All images in the above post are either original from me, or taken from Google Image Search, filtered for the right of reuse and modification, and either hotlinked directly, or altered by me