Unexpected Europe On The Plum Ride: The Road Less Travelled

When people say they’ve ‘seen Europe’, they usually mean they’ve visited a handful of cities: Paris, Prague, Budapest of course. And fair enough – they’re beautiful. But there’s another version of Europe that exists in between those places. You don’t really notice it from a train window and you definitely don’t experience it from 30,000 feet. But on a bike? Oh, you can’t avoid it, you actually ride straight through it.

Claude Monet, Stacks of Wheat (End of Summer), 1891. The Art Institute of Chicago (public domain)

For me, it’s like the Haystacks series by Claude Monet. At first glance, they could look the same, but stay with them a little longer, and light shifts, colours soften or deepen, and the mood changes completely. Riding the Plum Ride feels a bit like that. Even if you’ve travelled widely – the kind of person who doesn’t get easily impressed – this route still has a couple of aces up in its sleeve for you. But not with big names, rather with the moments you didn’t see coming.

Kokorinsko

The opening days along the Baltic – but not the version you’d book a hotel for. The roads shift in texture, the coastline appears and disappears, and the rhythm of the ride settles in before you’ve really thought about it. A quiet ride into Kokořínsko, a protected landscape north of Prague, where sandstone formations – some shaped like natural “mushrooms” – appear between thick forests, and the road slips through valleys known as “Mácha’s country”, named after a romantic poet who found inspiration in these forests.

Banská Štiavnica

A town like Banská Štiavnica, a UNESCO-listed former silver mining town built into the hills, where uneven streets wind through a well-preserved centre, and the surrounding slopes – marked by terraces and a hillside Calvary – quietly reflect its past. There’s a stretch where, in just two days, you ride through three countries – Hungary, a brief crossing of Croatia, and into Serbia – along the flat river plains shaped by the Danube and Drava, where farmland, wetlands, and open horizon dominate the view. The road runs straight for miles, the sky feels bigger than expected, and the borders themselves register only as a sign at the side of the road.

Cycling from Niš to Vranje, the route follows quieter roads along the South Morava valley for over 120 km, gradually shifting from open farmland into a more rugged landscape, where the road tightens and the terrain begins to take over. It’s a stretch often linked to the EuroVelo 11 corridor, but it doesn’t feel marked or curated – more like moving through a part of Serbia where history sits close to the surface.

Niš

Niš, once a crossroads of empires and the birthplace of Constantine the Great, carries that weight quietly, while further south, the atmosphere begins to change – Ottoman influence showing through in architecture, in pace, in small details you notice without trying. By the time you reach Vranje, the shift feels complete – a place shaped by a different rhythm, where stories linger a little longer than expected.

Lake Ohrid

Cycling from Mavrovo to Debar, the route runs for about 50 km through the largest national park in North Macedonia, where forested slopes give way to the Radika River gorge, and the road follows emerald water between steep canyon walls. Ohrid – a pearl of the route, where an ancient lake meets a UNESCO-listed old town, recently named the ‘prettiest place in Europe’ in 2026 – the kind of place that might remind you of somewhere like Lake Como, just without the same sense of being already fully claimed.

Thessaloniki

And finally, Thessaloniki – where Greece looks a little different than expected, less polished, more layered, and where the arrival feels less like a moment, and more like the natural conclusion of everything that came before. Europe isn’t just the places you recognize. It’s everything in between – the parts you don’t plan for, and only really see when you move through them on a bike.

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