Cats, good books, AI, and religious walking in the city of Sofia
I’m having trouble keeping up with the step count these days. The first snow fell on the mountain and it’s very dark, unpleasant, and cold outside, even though objectively, it’s not even close to freezing. Same time in January, I would find +4° to +10° C t-shirt weather, and I’m now going out with a winter jacket.
This is how I feel every time I manage to go out for steps:
The little one (7) asked to go to Cherni Vrah. After climbing Vihren and Musala, he’s now planning and nagging about going to other peaks, like Mount Olympus in Greece. I was a bit under the weather, with a slightly inured ankle and a neck that can’t turn right. But none of that prevented us from doing the hike. We went to the top. It was beautiful and we had good time. It felt very easy.
The highlight of our trip was that we found lots of blueberries and some rare raspberries. The raspberries were delicious but scarce, the blueberries were a bit overripe but abundant. The red bushes below are all blueberries.
The top was cold, some of the puddles were frozen. We have some time until the first winter conditions, though, as despite the cold, I don’t expect snow before December. I hope to have the chance to go to the top again this year.
Bansko is a winter ski resort town that’s rebranding to a summer resort.
Twenty years ago, Bansko was tiny. It had a small old town with historical buildings where people actually lived, a large museum for a person the communists really liked, and some restaurants where you could actually eat without spending a fortune. It was a place you’d visit on your way to the mountain and back, eat tarator, and drink beer.
Over the years, it gained a larger ski zone with a gondola, a million hotels, and became very busy in the winter. However, summers remained mostly empty with most hotels and restaurants closed until next winter. We would roam around between the 4-5 functioning nice restaurants. Even the nicest were still mostly okay price-wise, just a few started turning into tourist traps.
Something started changing over the last 2-3 years. The municipality started rebuilding the central streets and sidewalks. That process is pretty far ahead already, as you can see from the photos. The walking areas now stretch for many kilometers, historical buildings have been restored, the river has been cleaned, street gyms have been installed, and so on. It worked, and Bansko is now so full of people in the summer that it’s the busiest I’ve ever seen it. Restaurants that didn’t even exist last year are open, working and full of customers, with only a few still closed for the season.
Cats are everywhere
Unfortunately, I’m not sure I like this new Bansko as much as I liked the old one.
We won’t quit going to Bansko, it’s one of the places we are connected to. But we have to alter how we use it. From 5* hotels to rented apartments, and from trying restaurants to just sticking to the few places where we know the people who run them. After all, it’s the mountain that makes that place nice, not the freshly built 100-year-old tourists traps.
We certainly like the new pedestrian areas and the cat explosion that all these people have caused.
We managed to reach Vihren, first time all 4 of us to the top, together. Vihren is 2914 meters, and one of the more difficult peaks for rookie hikers in Bulgaria. The path we took had about 1100 meters elevation gain, which was the highest for me this year.
The little one, aged 7, successfully climbed both Musala and Vihren in a single year, an achievement I accomplished at 47. But it came at a price, the kids got way too tired. I doubt they’ll be interested in another hike this year.
This was not part of any grand plan. I just wanted to reach a peak with nobody dropping out.
One of my annual goals was to do three real hikes in 2026. A week ago, I did a semi-unplanned hike to the highest peak in Bulgaria, Musala, which is 2925 meters high. Kids couldn’t come with me because one got motion sickness, and the other didn’t want to come out of solidarity. However, they got inspired and wanted to go to the peak as well.
So this week, we attempted a retry. This time, phones were banned in the car, I drove extra carefully, nobody vomited in the car, and all four of us managed to get to about 2500 meters. Then the big kid got signs of altitude problems and had to give up.
The little one (aged 7) kept going, flying ahead of me for the most part, and we reached the top. Took us 3h, only 20-30 minutes slower compared to doing it on my own. He didn’t want to do any breaks. I’m not sure what to do now because I have one of the kids achieving this relatively difficult goal, and the other – not. Maybe we need to come for a third time this summer. We can still improve the organization because we lost 1h waiting for the gondola. The optimal hike would start with buying the tickets the day before and then going to the line at 8:15. Does it matter all that much if you start at 8:30 or 9:30 – probably not. You need to be super slow to miss the lift, which works until 18:30.
The final step count for the day was almost 30K, which is my personal best since I started tracking. I couldn’t imagine I would ever be able to do that 3-4 years ago, when I had trouble walking up to the 4th floor without a break.
