Tuesday April 11, 2006
I finally had my first bike ride last night. The arrival of the bike is a long, tedious story. It involved two baggage clerks at the airport who seemed to want to help me but gave me lots of excuses why tomorrow was a better day to deliver the bike. I finally got fed up after a half dozen phone calls and demanded they deliver the darn bike. Finally a charming delivery driver brought the bike to where I’m staying in Slovenia. Unfortunately he got lost and I had to scramble to find him before he gave up and went back to Italy. Turns out he was the guy on the corner looking frantically around for someone to show up and claim the bike. He only spoke Italian, but we communicated eventually.
The bike survived shipping in fine form and I reassembled it in about 30 minutes. My friend Stephen who is living in Slovenia took me out for a short 8 mile ride. He knows all the local towns and roads and took me on an amazing scenic loop. The roads are narrow but traffic is very light and drivers are extremely polite.
The picturesque towns here are similar to Italy. Except for the frighteningly foreign language I wouldn’t know I wasn’t in Italy. But with the Slovenian language it is impossible to “fake it”. Slovenian has strange hats over letters, very few vowels and a surplus of Zs and Ks. It’s tough to read the road signs whizzing past at 18 mph. Luckily I didn’t have to.
Towns are truly tiny here. Some of the hill towns are so tiny they have only one house visible from the road. Most towns have a little market abutting the road but that may be all there is. The buildings look very old – many were built more than 300 years ago. But the point is people are still living in the very comfortably. People were out manicuring rows and rows of vines and tilling the soil. It is a very labor-intensive agricultural area with small farms on steep hillsides, not very conducive to using tractors or equipment. Just manual labor. We got home in time to enjoy a roaring thunderstorm, luckily from indoors.
The next morning I awoke to wet streets, low-hanging clouds and cool temperatures in the 50s. Not a perfect day for biking but who cares? I’m here to bike. I rode a 30-mile loop over the Karst hills (limestone) and through dozens of vineyards. Steep climbs and even steeper descents added some serious technical and aerobic challenges to the ride. Finally, threatening clouds and fat raindrops helped make the decision to head back to the town of Nova Gorica and some serious eating. Pizza is a common food here, along with a buckwheat dumpling served in gravy or soup. But primarily it is a county of meat and cabbage.
Tomorrow is supposed to be sunny and warmer. It looks like a good day to ride back into Italy and toward the Adriatic, and I’m looking forward to feeling like I’m part of the local culture and enjoying the scenery.
I finally had my first bike ride last night. The arrival of the bike is a long, tedious story. It involved two baggage clerks at the airport who seemed to want to help me but gave me lots of excuses why tomorrow was a better day to deliver the bike. I finally got fed up after a half dozen phone calls and demanded they deliver the darn bike. Finally a charming delivery driver brought the bike to where I’m staying in Slovenia. Unfortunately he got lost and I had to scramble to find him before he gave up and went back to Italy. Turns out he was the guy on the corner looking frantically around for someone to show up and claim the bike. He only spoke Italian, but we communicated eventually.
The bike survived shipping in fine form and I reassembled it in about 30 minutes. My friend Stephen who is living in Slovenia took me out for a short 8 mile ride. He knows all the local towns and roads and took me on an amazing scenic loop. The roads are narrow but traffic is very light and drivers are extremely polite.
The picturesque towns here are similar to Italy. Except for the frighteningly foreign language I wouldn’t know I wasn’t in Italy. But with the Slovenian language it is impossible to “fake it”. Slovenian has strange hats over letters, very few vowels and a surplus of Zs and Ks. It’s tough to read the road signs whizzing past at 18 mph. Luckily I didn’t have to.
Towns are truly tiny here. Some of the hill towns are so tiny they have only one house visible from the road. Most towns have a little market abutting the road but that may be all there is. The buildings look very old – many were built more than 300 years ago. But the point is people are still living in the very comfortably. People were out manicuring rows and rows of vines and tilling the soil. It is a very labor-intensive agricultural area with small farms on steep hillsides, not very conducive to using tractors or equipment. Just manual labor. We got home in time to enjoy a roaring thunderstorm, luckily from indoors.
The next morning I awoke to wet streets, low-hanging clouds and cool temperatures in the 50s. Not a perfect day for biking but who cares? I’m here to bike. I rode a 30-mile loop over the Karst hills (limestone) and through dozens of vineyards. Steep climbs and even steeper descents added some serious technical and aerobic challenges to the ride. Finally, threatening clouds and fat raindrops helped make the decision to head back to the town of Nova Gorica and some serious eating. Pizza is a common food here, along with a buckwheat dumpling served in gravy or soup. But primarily it is a county of meat and cabbage.
Tomorrow is supposed to be sunny and warmer. It looks like a good day to ride back into Italy and toward the Adriatic, and I’m looking forward to feeling like I’m part of the local culture and enjoying the scenery.
posted by Janet B | 12:28 PM
1 Comments:
Yae - you got your bike! It all sounds beautiful. You are a very good travel writer! And now you'll bike back into Italy - it sounds fabulous.
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