- ODO 1838km
- Location just inside the Croatian boarder
- Weather broken cloud with storm breaking just as I crossed the Slovenian border
- Feelings Utter exhaustion in the morning but with a few power naps across the day I felt better by the afternoon
I camped across the other side of a sketchy wooden bridge. I was tired from the fall and the day before and my hip ached terribly. I couldn’t find an angle to lay on my small air mattress that wasn’t painful. Even oversleeping my alarm I hadn’t had an unbroken few hours sleep the whole night. I felt terrible. I ate and packed up in a total daze. But the ground was flat and I took particular care to repack the bags more balanced and descended any steep hills with real caution. My confidence has been shattered by the shock of the crash.
As the alps fell away into a Lincolnshire like landscape of south eastern Austria the route was quiet, segregated and boring. Beyond Graz the path became busy. I started to notice rest stops and checkpoints for a cycling event. I stopped and asked one of the events team. Hundreds of cyclists were taking part in the Tour de Mur event. Several days of cycling across Austria to the Slovenian border.
I traded words with some of the participant and my hip and knee began to feel better. After a nap break in morning I was feeling awake enough to power on to my goal of Croatia. First though I had to pass through Slovenia. As I reached the boarder I was being chased by a huge storm cloud which broke as I rolled through the abandoned border post. I sat under a covered car park to wait out the storm listening to a podcast and ate an entire bar of Milka chocolate. It’s just too tasty. I’d regret that later. I got indigestion for the rest of the day.
The area of Slovenia I passed through differed very little from Austria, it seemed well off and well serviced. I reached my first boarder check point of the trip at Croatia after only a couple of hours in Slovenia. The police took my passport for a few seconds and picked up my Ibuprofen from my bar bag to read the label then opened up the barrier and waved me through. As I entered the flat lands of northern Croatia I was hit by a wall of insects. The fresh rain had risen columns of mosquitoes into the air and I had to put my sunglasses back on even though it was now dusk. I met a few groups of kids, one younger one a little older who shouted greetings at me as I looked for somewhere to camp.
I finally settled on the edge of a disused quarry. The mosquitoes were so much I had to keep moving around until I could get my sleeves and trousers on and deet spray liberally applied to any open skin. As I cooked a small breeze picked up which helped to stave off the worse of the mozzies. Tomorrow my mission is to get some Kuna – the local currency – from an ATM and try for a big distance as it’s all so flat around here just like Munich.
