Polaroids of my Odyssey Trip in 2023

Some of my favorite Polaroids from my road trip in Eastern Europe in 2023

Jelle Van de Vliet

Jul 27, 2024 • 4 min read

Red line is a motortrain from Hamburg, Germany to Villach, Austria. Blue line is the ferry from Venice, Italy to Patras, Greece

A collection of the Polaroids I took on my road trip with my Bonneville T120 in 2023.

🚩My red flag is that 90% of the time I forget I have my Polaroid with me, and when I do remember it I take three similar photos of the same subject.

💡

Stay for the memories, leave for the bad quality photos - Jelle, 2024

Odyssey 2023

September 2023

This was my first bigger multi-country road trip, in a very limited amount of time.

I first went to Italy, to get the ferry from Venice to Greece.

Then from Greece I drove all the way north to Warsaw, and then drove back home.

Flags collected:

🇩🇪 🇦🇹 🇮🇹 🇬🇷 🇦🇱 🇲🇪 🇧🇦🇭🇷 🇭🇺 🇸🇰 🇵🇱

Greece

🎧

One of my favourite memories was driving among the coastline to Delphi, listening to Mythos by Stephen Fry

🪣

I had two bucket list items:

First: I wanted to bathe in the waterfall on Mount Olympos. The water was extremely cold (as you can see), but what an experience it was.

Second: To sleep among the Gods on Mount Olympos. Somewhere on Mount Olympos there is a monastery, and they were kind enough to let me pitch my tent in their garden.

Albania

Somewhere in the north of Albania I took a break because Google Maps was sending me through those mountains you see behind me, and those clouds did not look friendly at all.

A German group of motorcyclists stopped, we chatted a bit and then I asked one of them to take this photograph of me.

We drove together for a bit, and passed the border to Montenegro together. A bit later we said goodbye, as I was going to Podgorica and they were continuing on to Kotor.

Montenegro

The weather in Montenegro luckily got much better.

Bosnia & Herzegovina

One of my favorite U2 songs (it's technically not even a U2 song, but anyway), is Miss Sarajevo. I decided to stay a few days in Sarajevo to really absorb the city.

The city were WW1 basically started breathes culture and history. I had a really great time there, wandering about and meeting people.

Croatia, Hungary, Slovakia

From Bosnia & Herzegovina, I drove through the west of Croatia, towards Budapest, Hungary. From there I drove to the west of Slovakia towards Tatra National Park in Hungary & Poland

Driving through those little villages in Eastern Europe is such a nice experience. People are super friendly, curious about why you "chose" their village to ride through, and while Google Translate had to work overtime, it was very nice to connect with these fellow Europeans.