Hello and welcome to today's independent travel podcast with me Simon Calder. It's Monday the 12th of August. I'm in the very happy position of being at a big transport terminal, London Paddington Station. In fact, I'm a huge fan of public transport, but I'm not perhaps such a fan of public transport as the 180 people who will be taking part in something called race across Europe.

Yes, this is kind of commercial version of race across the world. You're only allowed to use public transport. And this year, they will be

aiming for Tirana in Albania, but via a mystery route so that they can't plan too much in advance.

I've got to find out more about this. And so I'm very glad to be able to welcome James from

Lupine Travel, who is organising the whole thing

and James very nice to see you but go on then what's the plan this time so ahead of time

all the races know is there's a theme to the event so last year they were Cold War spies taking

messages through the Iron Curtain.

This year there's a movie theme and I know that the first checkpoint is going to be in Bruges, which might ring some bells of some famous cinematic references.

But that's all they know ahead of time.

And it's kind of hard to give much away. They've got the kind of reference of what happened last year.

One third of last year's entrance have actually come back this year, so they've got some sort of idea what to expect. But yeah, we can't give too much away. But there's usually around half a dozen checkpoints. They can't fly, they've got to travel over land, and that's sort of how it goes. I've got an each-way bet on Vienna being one of them, of course, to the extraordinary scenes in the Third Man and many other films as well.

I know you can't possibly comment.

No, definitely not. I've got to keep it all close to my chest.

It's a bit of paranoia, very need to know.

So I've got people staffing some of the checkpoints, but they only know about their own checkpoint.

So there's almost no one knows the entire

plan except for myself so I take it very seriously last years was a very very exciting race

just one minute separating the two finalists Eleanor and Bram they both actually ended up catching

the same bus the terminus was in Istanbul,

same bus from Providence in Bulgaria, across to Istanbul, and then they ended up on the same tram,

and it was simply, do I get off at this stop or this stop, and Eleanor won. What did you learn from

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