This has been, for everyone on the trip, nothing short of a life changing experience. There will be people who have covered this kind of distance in the same timescale, most likely on a London to Saigon run. But I doubt anyone has ever done 1,000 km a day, plus sightseeing, through our mind blowing continent at this tempo, for 18 days. And nobody has ever done it in such a group and recorded it as diligently as we have.
I am still reassembling what bits of my brain are still salvageable. A meaningful reflection on the trip will take a few weeks, at which point I will produce my own day by day account and tie in links to the four blogs and the photo pool we are assembling.
In the mean time you can race through Europe with each of Lloyd, Darren and Dave’s blogs and drool over Paul’s photos and wonder what it’s like to see, eat and feel all that in 18 days. I will leave you for now with a fantastic shot Paul took of us all in Rome at a secret little spot the guys at Volpetti’s sent us to with the first instalment of the picnic.
The Great Circular European Railway Challenge 
You’re going to have to include this in your next European/Asian train epic.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/05/turkish-rail-tunnel-bosphorus-erdogan
Turkish prime minister joins trial run through rail tunnel under Bosphorus
Turkey has successfully completed a trial run of a rail tunnel connecting Istanbul’s European and Asian sides, the first of several planned mega-projects in the country’s largest city.
The 13.6km (8.5-mile) tunnel, including a 1.4km immersed tube – the deepest of its kind in the world at 56 metres – passes under the Bosphorus strait, the busy shipping channel linking the Marmara Sea to the Black Sea.
The Turkish prime minister, Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, who on Sunday boarded the first train to pass through the tunnel, said the project had been 150 years in the making, and that by connecting “London to Beijing” it served not only those in Istanbul and Turkey.
The tunnel is part of the larger £3.3bn Marmaray project which also includes an upgrade of suburban railway lines to create a 76km line that, according to the government, will carry 1.5 million people a day across the city’s two sides.