Day 40: Ljubljana to Ozeljan – 85k

3,222km down: 3,003km to go

I had an interesting start to the day. I had organized a wakeup call, as I always worry about not waking up on time and keeping everyone waiting for the convoy (I could of course just set the alarm on the phone). I was awake at 5am but then I went back to sleep and then I woke up with the sound of banging. I lay in bed for a while and then worked out it was the sound of knocking on a door. I lay there wishing the person in the room would open their blimmin door! Next thing a man unlocks my door and walks in and politely says “Time to wake up” and walks out again. I had not realized it was my door, as my room – as I said yesterday – was huge!

I thought to myself, after he had gone, what a quaint way to do a wakeup call, if I had known he was going to come up to my room maybe he could have bought me a cup of tea! I wondered if they had had problems with wakeup calls with people going back to sleep after they rang them. Haha, all was revealed when I went to unplug the iPad and found that I had unplugged the phone when I had plugged the iPad in to charge – doh! I had to rush around as by this stage as it was 5:55am and bags had to be down at 6am! Luckily I had packed last night.

So the good news today was that we were only riding 85k, the bad news was it was in 33+ degrees heat, and there were two significant hills – one was 5k and one was 10k, with some serious steep bits, one with a 15% gradient. I managed to get up the hills, although at one point I did hit my slowest speed ever without falling off.

The hills were up the Julian Alps which is the mountain range in between Slovenia and Italy. We stopped at 44k for lunch, this was at the steepest bit. It was the site of old Roman ruins. After another 10k we got to the peak but it was more rollers from lunch than steep hills.

Going down was great. It was about 15k, I still did not get over my top speed of 55 kilometres an hour but hit that three or four times. After the 55kmph mark I always start thinking about landing with face on the road, and then I start breaking!

We passed through some lovely little towns, one called Črniče looked really old, I googled it, and it is.

Ciran said to us that as soon as we got over the top of the ranges that we would be able to see how dry it was and he was right. Along with Ljubljana, this area is also suffering from lack of rain. It is so dry that the grass is brown.

I got to an intersection before the camp and there were two directions and no flag. “Damn,” I thought “Don’t tell me I have made a wrong turn again”. I took out my notes and spent a couple of minutes pondering, as it was about the right point to be near the camp. I decided I would ride another kilometre and otherwise I would go back to the last flag. Well would you believe it! I went another 100 metres and there was the camp. The ground here is so dry it’s cracked.

Camp Lijak (today’s camp)

Even with the hills we still got here by 1pm. It was 5 Euro for Wifi and 16 Euro for a wooden box called a room. Prices are starting to climb! The camp owner sells beer but not wine. Rob saw a sign for wine across the road and went over to buy some, he came back with a bottle that was like a fizzy drink 1.5 litre type bottle. We asked him what sort of wine it was, his answer was “red”. We all had a small glass, it was surprisingly good.

Is it a prison? Is it a toilet? No it’s my accommodation for tonight! Bit of a contrast from last night’s kingside bed.

Side view of accommodation. It is eco friendly (even has a straw mattress)

My accommodation for the night

There are a lot of flies here, Yarn spent a bit of time catching flies and setting up a fly farm, his aim was to have two flies under each glass.

Yarn with his fly farm