That about does it for our coverage from the Accursed Race #1. Thanks to you for reading along. On my end, I enjoyed the race and would do something similar again given the right circumstances. If you live close enough, I think the beauty and variety of the landscape is more than enough reason to sign up. I think the organizers did a really good job with designing the route. I have mentioned elsewhere that I’m a fan of their no-fly concept for traveling to and from the race.

People I met along the way were friendly and welcoming. Car drivers, of whom there were only a few on the course, were generally respectful to cyclists (pace the US State Department’s warnings, though I would not be surprised if, as elsewhere, in cities or on particularly busy roads, I would have a different impression). I felt about as safe or unsafe on the road as I do in Switzerland.

As usual, I cannot speak with any authority on “culture.” What little I experienced of interactions with people, their interactions with each other, road signs, advertisements, food, restaurants, etc. only made me more interested in spending time in the places we visited.

Preparing for “the Accursed Race” was an opportunity to learn a little bit about a part of the world of which I was mostly ignorant. On that score I give a big recommendation to Maria Todorova’s book Imagining the Balkans. It’s not really a history of “the Balkans.” Its focus is rather a history of the definition–porous and temporally unstable–of “the Balkans” and how it reflexively defines a concept of Europe.

One last reason to participate in the race is the chance to meet the other participants. It was really a pleasure to meet, well, everyone I met there. Hope to see you out another time.

all the photos

If all you wanna do is flip through photos and skip all the words, those photos, with a few extras, are all hiding in this flickr album.

There are also some nice photos to be seen from the organizers’ race reports and social media.