Fantastic day of cycling.
I arranged to meet Barth on the way out of town to make it over to the Bulgarian border just after Dimitrovrad. If I were to continue on to EV13, I would leave him at Dragoman where he would continue on to Sofia whilst I basically turned right to follow around Bulgaria rather than go through it.
I was still undecided if I would just continue on EV6, the tried and tested option, or take the EV13 which was less popular. I was going to see how the day panned out. Either way, it was nice to cycle with Barth and the weather was sunny and clear, certainly until later that afternoon when rain was forecast.
Knjazevac is at the confluence of two tributaries to the Danube and there was quite an active nightlife around them the night before and was an agreable route to take out of town.
The route to Pirot was just perfect, hilly with amazing views over the Stara planina mountain range and it was around about here I made the decision to take the Iron Curtain route.
The scenery was spectacular and the EV13 promised much more of the same, even if it were much hillier and remote, which in itself made it more of a challenge.
We stopped for lunch at Pirot and cracked onto Dimitrovgrad where we had heard it may be better to take a train over the border as the route was unpleasant and dangerous.
It didn't look so bad on the map and we had both got used to the huge trucks roaring past us. In fact, the road looked like quite a good surface and anyway, when we arrived at the train station, there were no trains so that made our decision easy. I pumped up the beat on my speaker with good old hard house and set off.
It wasn't pretty by any stretch of the imagination, the brand new road surrounded by the bleak landscape of recent excavation. In the far distance we could hear the sounds of huge dogs barking and snarling, and even saw some ugly looking specimens who would have loved a piece of us, but were safely behind gates.
Always nice to cross a border into a new country and there were lots of smiling people waving at us from their cars. One guy even rolled down his window and gave us some candy. We both looked so out of place in our fully laden bikes and lycra, I guess.
At this point, I left Barth who continued on for another 45KM to Sofia whilst I checked into the only hotel in town, which was a welcome relief.
The hotel was deserted and had an empty pool complex, although the view across to the Balkan Mountains was pleasant enough in the atmospheric evening light. Being so close to the border, with all of the traffic thundering on down the A6 to Sofia, the whole place felt a bit surreal.
It had been a long hard day of cycling, the weather was turning rather nasty looking and Dragoman looked pretty ugly in that light. I was knackered, but the room was nice, the restaurant open and the beer cold.
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