Normal service resumed on the weather front as we awoke to clear blue skies, sun and the promise of lots of heat to come.
The plan today has us cycling from Slimnic, Romania to Ramnicu Valcea also in Romania. A distance of around 70 miles and mostly on the main E81-7.
Now we were both a little concerned at returning to the main roads on a workday as we wished to avoid any repetion of the traffic horror show of last Friday.
A reasonable start to the day had us happily knocking out the miles due south on Route 14.
Within 10 miles, we arrived at the outskirts of the 'mega city' of Sibiu. To avoid the worst of any congestion, we took to the ring road.
Unusually, this went almost to the city centre and we got a good look at the walled city for which Sibiu is justly famous. Ahem.
Very busy dual carriageway took us beyond the outskirts and we picked up Route E81-7 south.
Anyone looking at the map at the start of this blog will see an eastwards diversion across Hungary and some of Romania. This was to avoid any unpleasantness further south in Bosnia, Kosovo and Serbia. It's good to be once again travelling in a southerly direction with the miles really counting torwards our ultimate destination.
The maps we have do not show terrain too well and we were pleased to find ourselves in a surprise gorge for most of today.
Despite the road not having a decent shoulder, traffic wasn't too much of a problem and in the main, reasonably well behaved.
Interestingly, the locals still seem fascinated by the tandem and we get lots of waving and pipping of horns. At one point today, we were running alongside the local train and it seemed as if all the passengers were waving us along.
We had great scenery with good cycling up and down rolling hills following the base of the gorge.
Towards the end, the gorge opened out into our first Romanian tat fest. We'd somehow stumbled on a local tourist resort complete with Soviet era 'Gulag' style concrete hotels.
The throngs of grockles going about their touristy business was a bit of a shock after the rest of Romania seemed completely devoid of any tourist activity at all.
Arrived into Raminicu Valcea, a nonentity town and safely navigated our way to 'Centru'. To avoid any embarrassing (not to mention knackering) extra mileage, today we stuck to the plan.
Town centre was a bit short of obvious accommodation so Tracey popped into a local Travel Agent (Igor Cookski perhaps?) and found details of a nice hotel nearby.
In case anyone thinks we've gone soft and can't hack it camping, Romania is proving to be a bit like Poland in the shortage of suitable campsites department.
Checked in, settled down, ready for more tomorrow.
In order to make even better progress into Bulgaria, we're thinking of ditching our next scheduled rest day and going for the Bulgarian border the day after tomorrow. This will be a couple of days ahead of schedule and we can then decide if we wish to spend any of this time in Sofia.
Today a surprisingly enjoyable 71 miles and a total of 390m of ascent. Total trip 2863 miles. Spot the imminent 3000 mile mark!
More Southerly ramblings to follow.
Back soon. Miles & Tracey.
