Dispatches 01–08 · February – September 2026
Eight stops from the Douro to the Carpathians by train, bus and ferry — no aircraft, no itinerary worth the name, and nine nights in a room above a print shop in Porto. Written slowly, with the prices left in.
Latest · Stop 08
The Citadel Still Has People In It
Sighișoara, Romania · 29 August 2026
The route
Diagram, not map.
Bearings true, distances not.
Dispatches
Sighișoara is a fortified Saxon hill town where 350 residents live inside the medieval walls — not a preserved site but an inhabited one. Notes from the last stop before autumn.
Kotor sits at the end of a drowned river canyon under 1,700 metres of limestone. Eleven hours on a bus to get here, 1,350 steps to get above it, and the cruise-ship arithmetic that decides your day.
Ljubljana has 295,000 people, no cars in the centre, and dragons on the bridges. Plus a day trip into a cave system that swallows an entire river.
Bologna's arcades mean you can cross the entire city in the rain without an umbrella. Also: tortellini in broth, a leaning tower nobody visits, and the best €9 lunch in Italy.
Ten days in the Kander valley waiting for a lake to melt, learning what a Swiss regional train costs, and walking above the cloud on a Tuesday.
Two weeks in a city that refuses to perform for visitors, a ferry to a prison island, and a walk into the Calanques that I got slightly wrong.
A pintxos crawl through Donostia conducted with a notebook and no dignity, plus the case for swimming in the Bay of Biscay in March.
Starting a no-fly year on the Douro: granite stairs, a rabelo boat that goes nowhere, and the discovery that the cheapest view in the city costs €1.40.
The rules of the trip