Three numbers in.
A marked trail out.

What you give it

Three things. How many days — counting the day you arrive and the day you leave, because those are days and they cost money. How much a day — bed, food and local transport, not the flights home. Where you can start — the city you can reach cheaply, which for most people is not the city they live in.

What it does with them

It takes the marked route through your start city and walks it in the direction that uses your days best. Fewer days than the route: it stops early, at the far end. More days: it adds a night where the route already lingers — two more per city at most — and tells you how many days are left over instead of inventing cities.

Start somewhere that is not on a marked route and it starts you at the nearest city that is, and tells you how far away that is.

Where the money comes from

Each night is the middle of the dorm-bed range on the route's page, plus that country's daily food and local transport from the budget page. Each leg is a typical fare from the route's page: what it costs a few weeks ahead, not the best fare we saw and not the worst. A night on a train or a coach counts as one of your days. A script checks every whole route against its own page, so the planner and the page cannot disagree.

What it does not know

Your dates. Whether a bed is free. Whether the one train a day from Rīga to Tartu runs on the Tuesday you want it, or whether there is a strike, a festival or engineering work that week. And the seasons: July on the Adriatic costs more than our figure, November in Kraków less.

Keeping and sending a szlak

Your last plan stays in this browser (local storage — nothing is sent anywhere) and is written into the address, so the link opens the same szlak for whoever you send it to. Copy a link to this szlak, under the strip, does that.