Nov 1 Bathes to Gramsh « Bird on Bike

46km

We woke to a heavy frost covering all of our gear and ice lining the inside of our tent fly.

It was cold and it was the parting day for us and Tobias. He would ride SH3 from Elbasan to the Macedonian border to and continue from there to Greece and we would ride the road from Elbasan through Gramsh to Korce, Albania. There were many nerves this morning, the cold, the parting, and the uncertainty of the road conditions of the 80km between Gramsh and Korce. We sparked a lot of curiosity in the, mostly, elderly, guests at the hotel and one of them greeted us and urged us to accept his offer of a whiskey to warm us up inside the resturant. This proved to be a great idea. We showed our routes to this man and “El Doctor” over our whiskeys and tried our best to communicate in Italian/Spanish because it was the closest we could come to a common language. The man and El Doctor dramatically argued over the condition of the road beyond Gramsh and all signs pointed towards bad news. None-the-less our morning whiskey with coffee was brilliant. It was a great way to close our nearly, three week journey with Tobias. It was hard to say goodbye but the whiskeys and the giant plate of cookies from El Doctor as a parting gift helped to soften the blow.

El Doctor and the Lucky Fox?

At the fork in the road, Tobias’s route was fool proof, and with the questionable quality of our road ahead (it was for sure going to be very beautiful we knew though) it would have been a certain decision to tag along with Tobias. But it was parting day, and at the fork in the road we choose the uncertain route for sake of differentiation and for a changing of the guards.

Now the story could be told two or three ways, depending on whether you were climbing over yet another ridge-line, or whether you were riding down the backside, or perhaps if we want to read into the fortuities.

From the Uphill perspective, we rode 46km on some of the hardest terrain yet to find that the next 70 or so were going to be on a road that resembled a dried up, rocky, river bottom.

From the Downhill perspective, We have never ridden through such a wild, natural, and beautiful place. We have never seen a culture still so linked to its traditions and simplicity of life, We met a darling 16 year old girl who we will surely keep in contact with, and we had a wonderful campsite along a muti-branched river.