The plan: put two bikes on the car, drive to Varna, leave the car and bike for three days sleeping on beaches and rocky shores.

The distances: calculations showed distances between 85 and 92 kilometers per day.

The equipment: one road bike with panniers and one cross country bike, lightweight two person tent.

Day 1

Biking for 10 hours straight under the hot sun, preceded by just three hours of sleep and five hours of driving in the night doesn’t sound smart. Funny thing is this has no effect on our story so unfortunately we didn’t learn our lesson.

Getting out of a big city with a bike is always problematic and Varna is no exception. Added to the normal heavy outgoing traffic was the nice surprise of a bicycle lane which suddenly disappears, to be changed with a big patch of broken glass. Urban planning concerning bicycles in this country is very creative so we managed to forget this swiftly and to plough on.

Main idea of a seaside bike trip is to travel along the coast, right? This being our idea also, we had planned our route accordingly and intended to follow through. After climbing up from Varna we immediately went down to the first resort Saints Constantine and Helena. Google Maps was showing a nice beach alley going through it promising nice atmosphere and lack of traffic. What we haven’t accounted for was a new hotel built on this alley which led us for the first and not last time this day to get our bikes in hands and carry them. The stairs that we had to climb were long and then some more and the happy vacationers that we were meeting there definitely thought we were taking part in some cruel competition or maybe reality show.

Biking can be quite boring — just moving your legs in circular motion. Almost like walking but the scenery changes faster. This was going through my head until we reached Albena — a jewel in the crown of the socialist resort-building, it hasn’t changed much since it was build in 1969. And compared to most of the Bulgarian seaside which is suffering from intense over-development this here was unchanged since I saw it for the first time in my childhood.

Albena and the next city on the coast, Balchik, are connected with a beautiful pedestrian road/bicycle lane. This was so obvious on the map that we wanted to make the most of it. We needed to, since the coast from there on was going to be mostly rocky. With high minds and resort-dwelling smiles we approached what was going to be the most easy, pleasant and enjoyable ride of the whole trip.

So when the road suddenly turned into a rocky trail and then hid itself in some high-growing marsh our mindset was especially entrepreneurial (at the end of this post there is a video edit containing the next part but until then I’ll ask you to bear with me and let the words do the job). Joke after joke sparked in the air with cheerful self-irony while pushing our bikes through a marsh turned into carrying our bikes over hot rocky trails. And then our beautiful denial was broken, the trail slowly disappearing into piles of rocks and trees and cutting our way completely. We dutifully continued going through the checklist of the five stages of grief and got angry — at Google Maps for showing us an idyllic coastal road and at the local authorities for not fixing this for years as was apparent by the overgrown marsh. After denial and anger we were ready for the third stage — bargaining. And I must say we have confidence in our bargaining skills.

Scouts were sent, up and down, by land and sea, to find a way of not turning back. The information that they brought us back was deeply discouraging but we were over this kind of emotion already. Ignoring ideas, strategies and common sense we put our bikes on our backs and went into the sea and its rocky shallows. Some wading and zero sea monsters later we were back ashore, bikes mostly dry, and were just discovering that the impassibility was not over.

Not to bore you with details, we discovered a trail that turned into marshes that turned into broken road which in itself turned into the perfect bike alley with a nice new bench every 500 meters. Being heavily adaptive it took us less than 30 seconds to take this for granted and bike into the next village looking for freshly squeezed oranges and some wharf to jump from.