The Unity Express - It's time for a Europe of the People

Measure in friends rather than miles

The Unity Express will travel through 24 countries. It’s an amazing journey of more than 11.000km, taking in diverse landscapes, from the fjords of Norway to the mountains of Switzerland, from the plains of Poland to the rugged terrain of Greece. We’ll even cross the Baltic Sea by ferry with the entire train!

We will stop in 14 cities and stay overnight in 8 of them. The overnight stays are arranged together with the CouchSurfing community.

As much as we would like to, for practical reasons, we obviously can’t visit all the cities of Europe in one go, but remember, this is only the first edition of the Unity Express. Future editions will follow a different route, so we can carry our message from the crossroads to the four corners of Europe.

About the cities

In the 2012 edition The Unity Express will stop in 14 cities along the route, staying between 12 and 36 hours in each city. We had a couple of wishes for all the cities:

• We mostly went for smaller cities, as we can have more impact with the project there in comparison to the big capitals
• We wanted to attend cities that are important for the history and future of Europe, such as Maastricht (1992 Treaty), Istanbul (considered the gateway to Europe) and Maribor (European Capital of Culture 2012)
• We wanted to include border cities as well to make the stops more interesting and to visit multiple countries at the same time; Frankfurt (Oder), Ruse and Maastricht are good examples of this. Different cultures and frictions often exist in these areas where sometimes as much as 3 countries meet each other.
• For the sleep-over cities it was very important to have enough CouchSurfers active in that area, so everybody can have a place to sleep.

Our itinerary at a glance