Ewan's Cycling Blog

I started writing this on a beautiful morning sitting on my lovely balcony at the Olympic Boutique in Constanța. As I drank my coffee a flight of fast jets (F16s I think) came roaring over the town heading out over the warships outside the harbour to patrol the Black Sea. I'd forgotten that I'm 100km from an active war zone… Overall Thoughts on Cycling Down The Danube Now that I've had a chance to decompress a bit from the cycling, it's time for some final impressions on this solo self-supported bike trip. The first thing to get out of the way is that this sort of travelling is a unique and very special way of seeing other countries, other places and other peoples. It is one of my favourite ways to travel. On a bike trip — particularly a solo bike trip — there is no insulation between you and your surroundings. Some of this comes from just being on a bike rather than a car but a lot comes from needing to b...

This is very much a “travelogue style” post. If you're more interested in reading about cycling stuff then you can skip this and head on to the Danube Cycle Wrap Up post. After sleeping the sleep of the dead — I really am a 400 threads per inch sheets kind of guy — I enjoyed a proper “hotel breakfast” complete with…an egg station! Despite being a 400 tpi sheets guy, I still consider an egg station the height of sophistication and class. However, there was no time to langourously savour a freshly cooked omelette and high quality sourdough bread. I had a major European city to “do” and I had about 8 hours to do it. First stop was the National Museum Of The History Of Romania because it was practically next door to the hotel. I had some great hopes for this museum and the façade certainly promised treasures within. A promisingly classical look to this one. ...

The Olympic Boutique was a lovely place to stay. Quiet, cool and it had an outstanding breakfast. The coffee shop downstairs did double duty as the breakfast location for the hotel and hence the coffee was superb. I packed my bean and saddled up for nearly the last time and rode from the old town up to Constanța railway station. I had been worried about getting to Bucharest by train for the last few days. This train trip with the bike was second only to the DHL Bike Bag Omnishambles on my list of “things to worry about that I can't control”. In reality, the single most important “thing to worry about that I couldn't control” should have been not joining the sombre ranks of Romanian Road Kill but eventually you get numb to that risk. The lovely lady in the ugly train station building hummed and hawed about the possibility of taking a bike on the train but she eventually found me a ticket on a slow train lea...

The last day ended as it was intended to with a stunning view over the Black Sea. However, today also had a variety of hurtful stings remaining in the tail end of the journey. That's the Black Sea that is. To get to the Black Sea I had 136 km to ride and, more worryingly 1,369m of climbing to do. Given that every stage so far had been pretty flat I wasn't really prepared for the climbing. 1,369m of climbing isn't a Mallorca 312 but it's not nothing and, despite today being cooler than the previous few days, it was still going to be 36 degrees for most of the day. Eeek. Here's the first “interesting fact” of the day. Last night I had done some calculations on the flow rate of the Danube (“Big D”), found some stats on the width and depth of the Danube and made some heroic assumptions about the shape of the river bed. An isosceles triangle with a bas...