Our Valley

Hello!

Still many days before the official departure. Anyways, here is summer but scarce. Yesterday was a nice summer day with average of 27 C and sunny blue sky.

We headed north, where low hills but very steep and Our River form a nice valley. On top of one of the hills there is a medieval castle and a pretty old town.

It was a nice test to do with the not recently acquired car. A lot of lovely forest and loads of sunshine!

PS: One of us got a collarbone fracture, but this does not stop us for hitting the road!

Do you speak…Backgammon?

One of the biggest challenge we will have to face this road trip is to overcome the language barrier. Within the Balkans more than 20 different languages coexist and there are at least 4 different families of languages widespread all around. This time there is no lingua franca to communicate all along the trip. We will be very naive if we think Russian and English would be enough to be able to make new friends and establish social relationships easily. Naturlich, we would not stay inside our own cultural bubble.

Nevertheless, keywords like hello, please, water or beer (depending on the country), thanks, cheers and bye are always a must. There are a lot of other non verbal communication methods we can employ but this time I’m talking about a “gaming” language.

Backgammon.  Mostly on Turkey but also in Albania, Montenegro, Macedonia and Bosnia people plays this game on bars, cafes, with friends or just random people. This time, playing backgammon will leverage our attempt to avoid the cultural barrier and make new friends.

We are already looking forward for our first game!!!

Getting ready to hit the road

One of the main drawbacks of having a car is the time demanding activity of taking it to the garage for repairs. Today was just a detail but it was related to road safety so it’s worthy to spend some time on it.

Anyways, I would like to use this opportunity for showing a picture of the car. Gentlemen, start your engines!

Preliminary route

More or less 6000 kms. Is impossible to see it all. Every day new incredible places come out from Internet, forums and travel guides.

45 days to departure, a lot of fun is coming so stay tuned!

View the preliminary route on google maps

The joy of life…

The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences, and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun.
― Christopher McCandless