Day 42 Emen to Elena

In which Sid and Doris leave the mosquito farm, test their decision making and save a big climb for the end of the day.

This is a key day in tackling the hills, rivers and roads to get from our Bulgarian start point at Bregovo in the North West to Svilengrad in the South East. Spoiler: we are now on track to get to Adrianople or Edirne in Turkey with three days riding. Then three days into Istanbul.

We had three plans to try today to get from Emen (which is near nowhere) to Elena which is at least a medium sized town. The first scheme was The Canyon Route to The Dam which cuts seven kilometres and a lot of climb from the route. We went down the rocky road until we found steps cut up the hill and then turned around. A fair investment but no joy.

The next was The Field Route a few k further on. This was six kilometres of a full on Euro Velo 6 stylee tractor route but it went and saved a lot of flogging over the hill roads.

This took us down to Mihaltsi where we were pleased to find another redundant jet (sorry I know we said no more plane pics but we were on camera autopilot a bit) and a rather grand town hall, which is out of proportion to this little town, and therefore quite typical for the region.

True Grit. An early incident was finding road works where a longish stretch of road had been sprayed with tar, but we could still ride over it (while waving happily to the tar-sprayers). So, when we come off the tar the tyres pick up a layer of grit. This is not the sort of thing Sid likes. He may be Sinewy, but he is still a fusspot.

Later, wheeze three was The Light Mauve Road. Here we refer to our paper map of Bulgaria with roads in different colours, where Bright Orange is autoroutes (so completely not an option for us) and Dark Mauve is Big “A” roads. We got onto the Light Mauve Road and found the traffic surprisingly not too dense and generally friendly. So we took the sense of the meeting and found we did not want a trip through the hills after all when we could go round them.  Doris observes that we have found a set of hills here which are like Mifter Bat’s farts – difficult to detect from a distance but surprisingly poisonous close up.

Although we have been riding through much desolation we can see that there was a lot of building in the 50s and 60s. Peasants got decent homes, villages got clinics, electricity, sanitation and there was steady work on farms and in factories. Yes, 80% of the Bulgarian priests worked for the secret service so confession might not have been quite between you, him and God but no one knew until 1990.

Lunch was in a Lidl car park burger stand. Sausage meat is manna to Doris but no good to Sid, he needs simple carbs.

 At Mindya, we found – probably unconnected – an excellent snail infestation (which we sat on to have our snacks, crunch crunch, feeling very Vogon-like) and this painting.

Other wayside shrines are to the more recent dead, such as these bikers.

It has worked out that the run to Elena has been OK at 84 kilometres with a few long hills, some briefly very steep, making 1015 metres of up. An emergency peanut chocolate wafer bar refuelled Sid like he’d had a new battery. Fabulous stuff sugar. (Sid and Doris are like a modern version of Mr and Mrs Spratt).

So, we are above Elena in a Panoramic Spa Hotel. It cost a lot of leg to get up here and two flights of stairs down to the spa area feels a bit challenging. We are a bit tired so we might be here for another night before pushing on, which will also allow us to work on Plan 7d(iv) in order to deal with the complete lack of hotels in useful places over the next 450km.