The route, roughly. Tomorrow I start a bicycle tour from Sofia, Bulgaria to London, UK. Originally it was planned simply because I had a bike in Qatar, where I'd recently finished a contract and I had a London event I was attending mid July ... So the obvious answer was ride there from Iran! Then I did some calcs and realised I'm not fit enough. So it became a question of the distance I could realistically cover in 55 days, and a starting point out from London matching that. This became Sofia when I realised I have always wanted to do Eastern Europe, and why not link every. Single. One. By bike :-)

I made the decision pretty much on the spot and planned the route over a couple of days. There was no special training, or complex planning. I have a bit a cycling experience including racing and have done many motorcycle tours as detailed in this blog.

One complication was my Specialized Tarmac Elite SL4 didn't have any fixtures to attach a luggage rack so I ended up having to ship it home with all my other stuff. Too late to back out though ;-) I was already too inspired. So I packed a 10kg bag of stuff that could be helpful in a 3500km cycling trip, jumped on a plane and bought a Scott Speedster Gravel 20 Disc the next day in Sofia.

Off I went.