Greetings from Bovec in Slovenia’s astoundingly beautiful Triglav National Park

The way we organise things is to ask the Concierge at our first hotel to get our large bike cases sent on to our last hotel. As a rule this works, although I remember one mildly frustrating evening in Venice when we discovered we had only the one bike box turn up between the four of us. This year it was Graham who organised these logistics so when a man in a dark suit started pointing at the bike boxes and laughing; as we were going down to breakfast, Graham attempted to confirm these arrangements with him. We observed that Graham was getting increasingly frustrated by this interaction, the man in the dark suit started shouting something in German. Graham shouted back something about BREXIT as the whole thing started to get a bit out of control. Needless to say, the man in dark suit was as much a concierge as I am, it transpired that whilst he was a keen cyclist, he had just rolled in from a wedding and was very much the worse for ware.

The Man in the Dark Suit...

We departed the excellent the Grand Union hotel in Ljubljana at about 8 O’clock and headed north west towards the mountains. A beautiful sunny morning as we started to climb through fields of white, yellow and purple wild flowers and fat Alpine cows eyeing us suspiciously as we pedalled by.

Into the mountains

 The small country roads turned into a network beautifully organised cycle paths, busy with rather earnest road bikers and families on their Sunday morning out. After a soup and pasta lunch at a restaurant in the ski resort of Kranska Gora, with questionable stock control policies as they served us Santa Claus Coca-Cola, we got into proper hills and this was tough.

Christmas in May

For my part, my cycling in Sudan meant I haven’t cycled up any kind of hill for the past 6 months so it was a nasty shock as we got into some 15% climbs. I caught up with Graham who was muttering “I bloody hate hills”, “they’ve only planned this route to get their own back” and “I’m nearly a sodding pensioner you know”.

Chris at the top!

When we eventually got to the top – Vrsic, at a modest 1611 meters, the view was absolutely wonderful. This is a stunningly beautiful country. The descent consisted of sharp hairpin turns and halfway down, Chris and I stopped to let the brakes cool down; Graham sailed past “I hate bloody hills”, “these roads are bloody dangerous, a pensioner could kill himself out here”.

Almost a pensioner - with a new green hat

At the bottom of the mountain, a positively Sudanese wind was blowing up the valley so we battled through until we got to Bovec, our destination. The Hotel Dobra Vila is a charming old place but we only had three rooms booked, thankfully Harley agreed to share with Chris providing he could have the room with the rocking horse, a rather shaping experience from his childhood, apparently.

What can I say...

Out to dinner this evening. Graham’s wearing socks with sandals.

Keep you posted...
 

Day 1 - quite a climb for day 1