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78km
Unfortunately, we had to leave the comforts of Sara and Gandalf’s warm home, but we like to think we left them full with our previous night dinner and good conversation. We know we were. We hope they will come to visit us in the states when they journey there in the next year or two. We think they would enjoy Chicago, but we will have to find a fixie (track bike/fixed gear bike) for Gandalf and maybe a short term messenger gig for him. He would be instantly at home with these comforts. Gandalf was the first, or maybe fourth, person in all of Slovenia to have a fixed gear bicycle, and with his killer mullet, we can’t help but think about this video we saw on facebook a while back.
The ride was on a direct route on the main road to the coast. Luckily, with the adjacent expressway, the traffic was calm and better yet with such a wide road. Postojna sits in a part of slovenia known as the karst. For information about Karst topography, click here
It was a chilly ride and we were hoping that once we dropped over the Karst Cliff some five hundred meters to the coast it would warm up….but it didn’t. Autumn had arrived, after avoiding it for so long. None the less, first sight of the sea was a much anticipated event, our first major goal achieved.
From Jowita’s hometown in Poland to the Adriatic Sea…..Check!
With our first view of the sea had us looking over some towns in Italy, and as we dropped over the Karst, everything changed to seem more like Italy, or what we think of Italy. The Architecture, the language, the fruit, the vegetation, the people, the towns, all so quickly changed to a new place. We had reached the Mediterenean!
Tobias and jowita cycling from postojna to the Coast
Church with Karst Cliff backdrop
View of the Karst Cliffs near the Slovene coast
Tobias snatching Japanese apples in slovenia
Cycling into old town koper, Slovenia
Wow, Tereza has given us a truly wonderful first experience with Couchsurfing.com. We cooked together, she gave us an internet connection at her University’s Library and gave us a nice bed in her Grandparent’s incredible apartment near the center of Olomouc. We wish we had snapped a photo of the apartment. It contained an incredible collection of memories, and are very happy to have been able to look into a few.
We rose in a light fog and our first morning on the road found us in good comfort with good coffee in a dewy meadow. We arrived there the night before in the dark with our headlights at full power after unwillingly pumping up another steep grade. The day had been much longer than we had expected and much hillier than expected. Poland was brown with bare fields and the overcast skies gave us a pale light that produce a certain uneasiness passing through the small villages. Much us this had to do with our lack in acceptance, or maybe trust, in our appearance, for the looks we were receiving were very much the same as our own but covered with an uncertain euphoria. It eventually gave way to acceptance and as the region grew more unfamiliar, we grew more comfortable on our strange looking bikes and with the obsurd goal of riding our bicycles to the Croatian coast, let alone, Turkey.
We had clocked 95km once we had rolled into Mikulowice and quickly found a hotel and went to get a room only to find we do not have enough Czech Koronas and they would not take our credit card. We considered giving him some USD or some Euros but thought we could find an ATM and/or another hotel or pension. It had gotten dark when we discovered that would could not do either of those and decided to turn on the lights and start heading towards Jesenik which, we knew, had both of those. The moment we got out of town, it got very hilly, and pumping up that steep grade did us in. Chad’s legs gave out at just about the most perfect moment, for he was in front of a homestead and when he flashed his headlamp to the left, there stood a man, in the distance, wearing a jump suit with reflective striping all over it. Sure enough just as we were deciding to ask the man to camp and for some water, he called out to us to see if we were lost. He offered the dewy field to camp and filled our bottles with water from his own spring.
And so began our second day, in the fog draped, dewy meadow. The day was way hillier than we were expecting. He climbed our first 10%grad hill and soon after our first 12%, according to our maps. But the scenery was spectacular. The browns and greys of harvest in Poland gave way to the greens and blues of meadows, forests, and distant hills of the Jeseniky Mountains. The clouds parted and gave us a good sunshine. It was a shorter day in mileage for anticipation of some climbing but it still stretched to our long fast decent at dusk into Velke Losiny and a little hut where we stayed in town.
The third day was a good blend of the first two. Some of the greens and blue hues of the second day dappled with the umbers and ochres of the first; Clouds broken by sunrays; good pavement; bad gravel; forest and fields; industry and nature. We rolled into Olomouc and circled through its pristine ring of gardens complete with old fortifications built onto protruding rock formations with the town center built above. Music fell over the ancient walls and into our ears. We were in search of a Russian church where we would find our host for the evening, our new friend Tereza. Together, we cooked a meal of lentils and rice with loads of vegetables, a good purging of the meat overload from back home in Poland. We drank raspberry vodka and talked until our eyes grew close towards sleep. We woke to our first rainy day and it is ok.
