Ireland to Istanbul

blorg

Last month I cycled to Istanbul.

I've put up an account of the trip; might make some light Friday reading (warning: long, but you can look at the pictures.) :pac:

dayshah

I'd love to do something like that.

About how much did you spend on the actual trip (excluding the bike stuff etc)

blahblah06

Super stuff really enjoyed reading it

penexpers

Great stuff, really enjoyed reading.

ROK ON

Well done. Great read.
Obdervation.
1 very sad about the train incident on day1
2 kebabs are indeed very nice food.
3 Asia is nice. You should go there. (I have only been to some of Asia, it was brilliant. I am assuming it is nice eberywhere).

damoz

blorg wrote: »

Last month I cycled to Istanbul.

as you do.........:)

AstraMonti

Well done! I am so jealous

Gavin

Well done Ivan, fantastic trip, delighted it all went well for you. That pan au chocolat looked very nice

Jawgap

blorg wrote: »

Last month I cycled to Istanbul.

........not Constantinople?:)

Great read - makes me want to get as far as Serbia just for the pain au chocolat.

el tel

That's awesome.

joker77

blorg wrote: »

Last month I cycled to Istanbul.

I've put up an account of the trip; might make some light Friday reading (warning: long, but you can look at the pictures.) :pac:

Nice one blorg - you spent a lot of effort putting the whole thing down in words, I've one little favour to ask? Could you catalogue exactly what kit you had? (type of rack/panniers, tent, clothes, food)
If it's too much trouble then a brief outline and tell me to f... off

I am reduced to bargaining with toilet attendants.

:D:D

Mickeybags

Well done

An enjoyable read

You put in some big days

Like previous poster I am interested what "gear" worked well for you and what you might use next time?
What would you do differently etc?
(You mentioned a new rear wheel in another post)

Thanks

oflahero

Good Jaysus. I'd expected some touring exploits given the relative blorg quietness of late, but this....

Honestly, this is amazing. I would've completely gone to pieces after the first couple of flats, mozzies and signs of a dodgy knee, let alone a blown rim.

Mr. Skeffington

Brilliant stuff Blorg, really enjoyed the report!

setanta159

inspirational stuff, well done. What's next?!

loyatemu

really great read, well done.

papac

Curse you Blorg-on two fronts.
1. Dingle to istanbul in high on my list of wanna do's and I am insanely jealous.

2. I am going to England for a wedding in the morning,have loads to do, and I have just spent two hours drinking coffee and reading your account. Now I'll be running around like a blue arse fly for the rest of the day.

Well done. Great spin.

SubLuminal

Man, I can't wait to get out there and do some of this stuff myself. Nice one blorg! Great reading and unfortunatley a terriffic distraction from the work I'm supposed to be doing right now!

rottenhat

Well done, old scout...I think I like the bit about paying for internet so you can torrent dodgy old Scorpions tracks best. Looking very slim in the last picture, in spite of the obsessive recounting of the enormous quantities of food you ate.

Funkyzeit

Can't believe you got the plane back...

Epic stuff Blorg

Caroline_ie

Funkyzeit wrote: »

Can't believe you got the plane back...

...and flew to the Alpes the Next day for 3 sportives including the Marmotte.

dave2pvd

Holy carp. What a trip. Well done, mate.

Interesting that the Aksium held up so well. I have put mine through all sorts of abuse and they still run true.

Beasty

"crazyguyonabike.com"

Bit of an understatement in my opinion!

Well done on a tremendous effort blorg

ednwireland

Caroline_ie wrote: »

...and flew to the Alpes the Next day for 3 sportives including the Marmotte.

just to get your carbon footprint back up a bit

kennyb3

Blorg, unbeliveable stuff, i would love to do something like that someday. the what ifs always get in the way but you make the impossible seem possible.

PS you owe my boss an hours work

Planet X

Great ride Ivan, well done.

ROK ON

@Blorg.
Food related questions. It didn't sound that you ate a whole lot of food. How many cals /day do you reckon it took to fuel the journey.
Did you ever tire of carbs (pastries, pizza, sambos) and crave an orange, steak or a curry.
Curuousity. I would find the diet tedious after a while.
I guess the further east you went things became more protein and less carb. Did this make any difference.

Well done again.

blorg

Thanks to everyone for your encouragement.

I have put up an equipment list now as requested. I may have missed some stuff off this so if anything stands out in the "what you mean you didn't have one of..." sense let me know and I can add it (if I did.)

@ROK_ON- I ate a lot of food! I would start a day in France with maybe 4 or 5 pastries and continue from there. I'll work on including some details of this. I like my food but eating the same thing day after day isn't a problem for me at all. Basically I just adapted to whatever was available locally; I was only in a country for five days at max

RobFowl

Blorg I am incredibly impressed and a little frightened by this adventure.

You are quite unique, Well done..

(And don't ever change )

velo.2010

Surely a crack at the 'Round the World' record is on after this performance.

Paul Kiernan

Absolutely fascinating, Blorg, well done.

You seem to have got a lot of punctures? Were they pinch flats? I would have thought 28mm tyres a bit skinny for the load in your panniers (and the road surface!)? I'm curious as I'm building up a kind of combined winter bike/light tourer at the moment!

henboy

Just started reading this its class going to grab a beer and give it a good read . How bad for a friday evening Well done Blorg

Lumen

Brilliant, just brilliant.

Love the comments about skinny racing cyclists. Have you looked in the mirror recently?

blorg

Paul Kiernan wrote: »

You seem to have got a lot of punctures? Were they pinch flats? I would have thought 28mm tyres a bit skinny for the load in your panniers (and the road surface!)? I'm curious as I'm building up a kind of combined winter bike/light tourer at the moment!

They were not pinch flats, no. Most were debris but at least two were the problem with the rim falling apart. 28mm was OK on smooth or even moderately potholed roads (like we have here) but I could have done with more as I headed into Eastern Europe and the roads deteriorated- for comfort more than anything else. Despite this though basically all the punctures came in France with only one, in Serbia, for the rest of the trip.

One of the big problems with 28mm tyres with the load was that I really needed a high pressure in the back (110PSI) and this was impossible to get up to with my hand pump. The CO2 was OK but I suspect over the course of a few days this leaks out and the pressure drops. At one point I found a bike shop with a track pump and got it pumped up to 110 and this made a big difference. Being able to run lower pressures and the relative ease of achieving such pressures is a main reason I have already changed to 35mm, comfort on the rough roads is also a factor but probably secondary. I had spare bigger mudguards rated to 37C anyway. I just hope that is enough; I would need to change my mudguards to go to 40mm.

rottenhat

Can you not get a frame pump like a HP-X or the Topeak knock-off thereof on there? That would get you up to 100psi+ without too much sweat. What did you replace the Stelvios with?

blorg

rottenhat wrote: »

Can you not get a frame pump like a HP-X or the Topeak knock-off thereof on there? That would get you up to 100psi+ without too much sweat. What did you replace the Stelvios with?

I used a variant of the Topeak Morph before touring in Sardinia and Sicily (on 700x25c, bad idea.) Now it could just have been the cheap knock-off but track pump it was not. It did get very tough at higher pressure. It is also genuinely enormous. A frame pump would probably make sense all right.

I replaced with Schwalbe Marathon Racers in 700x35c. These did a brief stint on my commuter before. They are much faster than the standard Marathons, very nippy tyres indeed. I am considering the new Schwalbe Marathon Dureme for slightly rougher stuff (unsurfaced roads.) It seems to be designed for durability with a smooth centre for good on-road performance but a few knobs on the side for unsurfaced roads.

I have slowly been moving towards wider tyres and have had 700x37c on my commuter for around a year now. To be honest they don't seem significantly slower, certainly not over a tour, and there is both the ease of inflation and the extra comfort on rough surfaces (which is very real.) I would go 700x40c for the rougher stuff I think were it not for the mudguard clearance issue.

rottenhat

No, the Topeak one I'm thinking of is called the Roadmaster or something equally retarded, and it is very much an updated version of the Zefal HP-X. The Morph is a clever design but still not up there with a frame pump.

el tel

Hmmm Afri-Cola, I love that stuff. Funny you should mention the limitations of the cycle paths, I had inteneded to cycle along the Danube paths through Germany and Austria this year (I have done some sections before) and my German friends talked me out of it - arguing that it would be boring and bunged with too many slow riders.

Did you visit any sights -or mostly keep the head down and pedal? Eg in Mauthausen did you see the concentration camp? It's rather

Lumen

rottenhat wrote: »

No, the Topeak one I'm thinking of is called the Roadmaster or something equally retarded, and it is very much an updated version of the Zefal HP-X.

Topeak Road MasterBlaster™.

BikeRadar review (yeah, I know) says "700x23 from zero to 110psi in 100 strokes".

I vaguely recall my mini pump taking over 300 strokes to get a 23mm tyre to 90psi. Got I hope I never have to do that again.

Ole Rodrigo

Thats the coolest thing I've read in ages.

Congrats !

blorg

250 vs 100g though... I am happy enough with the performance of the Pocket Rocket to be honest, certainly on the wider tyres it is more than sufficient.

el tel wrote: »

Hmmm Afri-Cola, I love that stuff. Funny you should mention the limitations of the cycle paths, I had inteneded to cycle along the Danube paths through Germany and Austria this year (I have done some sections before) and my German friends talked me out of it - arguing that it would be boring and bunged with too many slow riders.

Did you visit any sights -or mostly keep the head down and pedal? Eg in Mauthausen did you see the concentration camp? It's rather

Well I am no great fan of cycle paths. To be honest though it was mostly that I was trying to get somewhere on a schedule and doing large distances each day. When you are tired and everything hurts, faced with the choice between a perfectly smooth flat road or a path that is not and bumps up and down and goes around the houses a bit, the road is just more appealing. I have enjoyed segregated paths when I am not in any rush and indeed enjoyed them on this trip where they were more of the small farming road variety going somewhere different, not just this thing pegged beside some other road.

The Danube trail was in many parts very picturesque and goes past or through a lot of interesting places. As to it being boring, that would be the wrong word- but I did get a sense of artificiality, it all being very manufactured. I had corresponded with GearoidP about it and he said as much before I went, and it was so. Also: I actually like Germany but there is also a certain rigidity about rule following there that strikes me as almost robotic and inhuman. Eastern Europe had a far more ragged stuck together feel that I preferred. It was also cheaper

They were congested in places but even for me that wasn't a major issue, you could go around people no problem.

I visited some stuff that was on the way but in the main just looked at exteriors... The trip was mainly about being a long bike ride rather than sightseeing (which I have done plenty of.) I didn't visit the concentration camp but I've been to Auschwitz and Dachau before and so didn't feel I needed to repeat it. To be honest I wouldn't have had time either, those two really had a large emotional impact; they are not places you could just rush through.

ullu

Fair play Blorg.

Does your lifestyle generally permit trips of that nature or was this a once in a lifetime thing?

blorg

ullu wrote: »

Fair play Blorg.

Does your lifestyle generally permit trips of that nature or was this a once in a lifetime thing?

Not generally, no. It was something I had wanted to do for a while but unintended circumstances ended up making it possible I made the trip in under three weeks in the end only as I had a constraint of the already arranged Marmotte week. But three weeks would be possible for many people.

levitronix

I just read through your blog from the trip .. fecking hell !! Amazing !

Read it all, amazing journey. Congrats!

I have a smaller version of the Master Blaster (Pocket Rocket I think it is) with a pressure gauge which I got a few years ago which I find excellent.

Aoibheann

That was amazing to read - move over Nicolas Roche and his Tour diaries! :pac: Congratulations, I'd say not many people have pulled off something like that.

I'd absolutely love to do something like it, but it might take a while 'til I'm anyway competent enough (and fit enough!) to manage.

Tonyandthewhale

Did you find Mosonmagyaróvár deathly quite and eerie, or was that just me?

Ant

That was a lengthy but most enjoyable read: a very well written account with maps and some great photos.

I liked all the details about the different food, terrain and attitudes to cyclists that you came across in the different countries. I was surprised to find that Serbia is still such a police state with regard to the documentation of visitor's details of their stay in the country.

Mechanicals are annoying but it must have been really frustrating and distressing to be dealing with such serious leg / knee pain. I'd imagine that you were worrying that you might be doing yourself longer-term damage.

I was going to say that it's an inspiring account but I couldn't ever imagine being able to do something like that - not unless I win the lottery or marry a consultant doctor. My own modest goal is to cycle the Spanish section of the Camino de Santiago.

I can go fast for a few days but I can't do this day after day for three weeks.

I take it that means we won't be reading your account of competing in the Tour de Franc in the near future.

furiousox

oflahero wrote: »

Good Jaysus........a blown rim!

Did you go via Amsterdam? :pac:

Seriously..sounds amazing, looking forward to reading the full story now.

dave2pvd

Re the knee pain: how confident are you that your bike is set up properly? I noticed in one of the pics that your saddle looks pretty far back. Is the knee pain at the front of your knee?

Of course you could be composed of giraffe-length femurs, so that's just pure speculation on my part. I do like to speculate though.

Lumen

dave2pvd wrote: »

Re the knee pain: how confident are you that your bike is set up properly? I noticed in one of the pics that your saddle looks pretty far back.

He started out with a not very setback post and the saddle forward on the rails, hurt himself, then moved it all back.

Second day in France. Saddle <7cm from BB.

In Turkey. Saddle almost 10cm from BB.

A more forward position means lower effective saddle height for the same actual height, so more knee strain.

Day 3:

"Leaving I just grabbed seat and seatpost, not considering that the layback on the road post is substantially less than the post I normally use on my tourer. I got through the first day without issue but from the afternoon on the second a niggle started to develop in my right knee that would develop into a major problem over the week. The pain came with the compression of my leg and I reckoned moving the saddle back would open up the angle and relieve this. The leg was a major feature for the rest of the tour."

Day 6:

"Just around the corner from the post office I found a bike shop and replaced the seatpost with one with more layback"