With no real plans for today we decided on a walking tour of the city. A 10am start allowed us to have a lazy start to the day and still arrive outside the Palace of Justice with time to spare. Kris was our guide today. He is a native of Sofia who studied in Germany and then chose to come back to Sofia to live. Kris had a great knowledge of the city and to be honest by the end of the tour all of the fact and dates that get crammed into the two hours get muddled by the time it comes to writing the blog. Some interesting facts that I can remember. As I mentioned yesterday, Sofia is the 3rd oldest capital city in Europe behind Rome and Athens, it's original name being Surdica. ... read more

At dinner last night we decided that instead of travelling 25kms to Dimitrovgrad, we'd travel 50kms to Dragoman into Bulgaria, making the following day to Sofia much more manageable. It was also the fact we couldn't find any available accommodation in Dimitrovgrad which helped force this decision. We had breakfast at the hotel and left just after 8am. We had to ride the 25kms to Dimitrovgrad and then there were two climbs similar to yesterday to negotiate before coasting downhill into Dragamon. Well, part one of ride to Dimitrovgrad was plain sailing and easy riding. As we left town and started up the hill that are route was indicating, an old bloke sitting on his porch said the road we were on stopped just up ahead. We had a dilemma. We decided we'd ride along the ... read more

Just a short (and solemn) blog post today as we actually did something quite unusual for most of our rest day - we rested. We did visit two historical sites from WWII that are related in the most horrific manner. You see the Nazi's turned the Kings Army Barracks and surrounding buildings here in Nis into a concentration camp. It was mainly used for short term detention of prisoners before being relocated somewhere else as forced labour, unless of course they were executed instead. While some executions were carried out in the camp, most were taken to Bubanj a few kilometers away where they were executed and placed in mass graves. The concentration camp is mainly untouched from the end of WWII and is now a museum in honour of those that were imprisoned and murdered ... read more

We had an early breakfast and were able to get away by 8:00am. A good distance today of 63kms, right in our sweet spot. We left the chaotic drivers of Jagodina behind and on to the same side road we were on yesterday. Again, mostly local traffic, but it does get a bit busier in the small towns we go through. We had another tail wind today which make the riding all the more easier. We have been making much better time than previously with it's help. The morning is mostly uninspiring again, not much to see up close but we can see the surrounding hills coming into focus, one of which we need to climb. By our morning break we have covered 40kms, just 23kms to go and we are at the base of today's ... read more

Our last day on the Danube and as has been the case for the last week, even though we've ridden by the Danube we rarely saw it. A bit sad really. To leave today, we had to ride our way across the very big city of Belgrade. It was mostly up the side of a very big hill. We had climbed a good way before descending to cross the bridge over the Danube and I pulled over nervously looking ahead. It looked like a freeway entrance to the bridge. I thought maybe I had routed as a car instead of a bike, but no, we were meant to ride on the bridge with all of that traffic. We nervously entered and then just rode as fast as we could across the bridge which was almost two ... read more