Steve's Cycling Blog

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I’ve taken to being the last person to leave, or at least one of the last. It doesn’t seem to make that much difference to how long it takes me to get into camp but it does mean it’s just that little bit warmer!

It didn’t help overly much today – the first couple of climbs helped to warm me up, but then on the descents I was freezing again!

At the 40km mark I was seriously beginning to wonder how the day was going to play out – at that point I’d done about 75% of the climbing and 60% of the descending planned for the day and yet was only 25% of the distance in.

Three kilometres later all became clear as I got to the bottom of a descent and turned onto a main road, complete with shoulder, asphalt and only very gentle undulations rather than the huge climb and descend variation of the first 40km.

And then this happened

It takes us a little further to get there as we don’t follow this highway all the way in, instead heading up to the Black Sea coast for a couple of stages, but it sure makes the end seem pretty close!

Lunch was in a great spot – a small rest area off to the side of the road which turned out to also be the local bus stop which meant that a considerable number of older locals came by and stopped in to find out about the ‘circus’ in their little rest area.

The remainder of the ride was pretty uneventful and continued much as the later part of the morning with a great road and gentle undulations. The most interesting thing was all the hydroelectric infrastructure with dams and canals and powerhouses every couple of kilometres.

Into camp and though it’s effectively a gravel ‘yard’ it’s in a pretty cool place above the valley – if it stays clear we should get some good stars tonight!

I was also surprised to find Ivan in camp – when I’d passed him earlier in the day he’d been just starting up a hill and wasn’t his usual cheerful self – it turns out that he’d injured his foot and was finding riding extremely painful so as the dinner truck had come past him about 15km into the ride he’d flagged them down and ridden the bus into camp.

I took a bit of a wander round and have been trying to catch up on blog posts this afternoon. Given that we’d seen the first signs for Istanbul this morning I also did some checking and discovered that we’ve covered just over 11,600km and have 934km remaining – into triple figures 🙂

Dinner and another camp fire to round out the day then into bed – the stars were good, but not great – still don’t really get the effect of the Milky Way ‘belt’ like I’d expected.

Riding data

View from my tent