A cycle ride along the Iron Curtain

Paul Kaye (aka Curtainrider) has a blog here about his cycle ride along the path of the old Iron Curtain, starting in Lübeck on the Baltic Sea, to Trieste on the Adriatic. My more modest aim in 2009 had been to walk around the whole of the Berlin Wall from Staaken in the West to the Brandenburg Gate in the East and back to Staaken - starting on 13 August. Unfortunately other commitments stopped that happening, so perhaps I will have to wait until 2011 and the 50th anniversary of the Wall being built - I am therefore even more impressed at Paul's achievement. The BBC Web site had a photo gallery, there's also a Facebook page, and a book of the trip. Here's what the blurb says:

For forty years Europe was divided into two opposing ideological blocks, participants in a global Cold War between communist East and capitalist West. Where these political enemies met, the eastern regimes built an elaborate Iron Curtain, outwardly aimed at protecting themselves from western invasion but in reality to keep their dissatisfied populations captive. Twenty years after revolution removed the communist rulers, what remains of the barriers they erected along Europe’s political faultline? Journalist and photographer Paul Kaye cycled 3,600 kilometres along the route of the Iron Curtain, from the Baltic to the Adriatic and around Berlin, to record the physical remnants of the divide and the thoughts of those that lived along it.