Steve's Cycling Blog

Tarmac. Downhill. Tail wind. Shower.

Four words to gladden the heart of any long-distance cyclist who’s been camping for the last seven days!

Even though we’d stopped early yesterday today was going to be a quick and easy day to get to our next rest day in Gorno. And with the bonus of scrambled eggs for breakfast, today’s going to be a good day.

Stage 30 – Gorno, here we come!

I’m generally about the 4th or 5th person to leave camp in the morning – I’ve always been a quick eater, and once breakfast is done there’s no reason to hang round at the campsite any longer so I’m off as soon as I’ve eaten.

Today I caught Erwin and Paul relatively quickly, but it took me a while to catch up with Grant and Jackie, but once I did we rode together through till lunch. And we were flying. ‘Lunch’ was at just under 60km, and we got there in just on two hours which gave me an average speed of 29.9 km/h. Given I’d left at 0545, that meant I was eating ‘lunch’ at 0745, and back on the road shortly after 0800!

The remainder of the ride was a little slower as I kept finding old Soviet era signs to take photos of (they’re down below), and there were a few more uphill sections as well, but none-the-less I was at the hotel well before 1000.

I have to say it was pretty surreal riding into Gorno this morning – I would never have imagined that at some point in my life, at 1000 on a sunny Saturday morning, I’d be riding a bicycle into a small rural city in the south of Russia! But there I was, and I was loving it 🙂

Here are two further words to make any member of an organsied cycle tour even happier when they get to their rest-day hotel

Single room!

Nice bonus that one, as was 100R for an entire weeks worth of washing to be done (that’s about £1) – this is shaping up to be an extra good day.

The only grey cloud was that our permanent bags, and therefore all my clean clothes and toiletries are in the lunch van, so not expected at the hotel till about 1400 – oh well, the town will have to put up with me unwashed for a while.

To fill in the time I went exploring – it’s a much larger city than I expected, though very long and narrow crammed in between two ranges of hills. I stopped in for a beer here, and an ice-cream there, and had a general wander about.

One of the things which I’d been looking to buy were some clippers to deal with the fact that my goatee had got seriously out of control over the last few weeks. Unfortunately I couldn’t find any that were suitable, either too crappy, too bulky or too expensive… I tried to trim things back with the scissors on my leatherman, but that didn’t work out so well so in the end I had a shave:

First time my chin’s seen the world in quite a while! Doubt it’ll last.

The remainder of the afternoon was spent getting washing sorted, blog posts done, and generally having some downtime. When it came to dinner time I wasn’t feeling particularly sociable, so wandered over to the nearest supermarket and picked up some cooked chicken, salad and a bread role and had that in my hotel room (did I mention it’s a single room 😉 ).

Breakfast’s till 1030 tomorrow, so I’m planning on it being a slow start and a very quite day as well…!

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