Ride Summary

Distance: 30ish miles
Climbing: 1460 feet
Descending: more
Difficulty: medium-low
Link to workout in Strava

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Link to photo gallery from this trip - sorry, I won't be able to link individual photos in these posts!

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Kicked around reading my book for quite awhile yesterday since we did so little riding. The forest camp was quite a nice place to hang out though, even in the rain, with covered seating and beers for sale. probably it would be less nice in case it was busier but we had the place almost to ourselves. Forgettable pizza for dinner at one of the few restaurants in the area, and even fewer open past 7pm on a sunday.

Got up this morning and got ready to go and got a kinda stern lecture from Jeff about showing my appreciation more. He sometimes doesn't listen when other people talk - the half dozen times I've said thank you with great feeling, for instance - nor was he interested in "arguing about it" so I just spoke the language that matters to him and will start buying him meals and promised to give him money to fix up his bike after I'm gone. I am trying to focus on the joy that discovering Slovenia has given me rather than the shit he made me feel like in what I consider an unfair way, since there's little to be gained and I have to spend the next few days with him no matter how I feel.

We nonetheless had a great ride today, some small highway riding on the way out of town before a long bike path most of the way into Valenje, a very bike-infrastructure-y city we passed through around brunch time, where I bought us some coffee and he flirted with some campground owner he met once and likes the look of. But I look forward to maybe exploring Valenje on my own sometime if I come back; it seemed like an interesting juxtaposition since it also has a huge coal plant, digging the coal for which created a beautiful lake along which we rode into and out of town.

After that we turned straight uphill, on a less traveled road that wound through some pretty countryside. I'm torn about going that way if I return since it was pretty, but it was also a bit indirect and rather steep. With only 1400 feet of climbing, it was over fairly quickly but if it were raining or hotter I could imagine it being annoying to push a non-e-bike up that hill. Good views from the top, though; Jeff says it's another one of his top 5 routes in Slovenia, and while I wouldn't argue with the last one he called that, this one was good but maybe not great? I'll think on it some more.

Dropping down into a town, was Green Gold brewery, one of Jeff's favorites and the staff there certainly do like him. They plied us with beer both to drink there and to take with and their art is...certainly distinctive. You can see some pictures in the gallery. Regardless, a kind crew that welcomed us back from the country and also saved us from eating mediocre food as they established that the best restaurant within some miles was surprisingly open today despite our assumption it would be closed for a monday.

We stopped and ate at Franci restaurant and indeed lunch was quite good. Jeff and I were both pretty beered up still from the brewery stop but had another with lunch. My lunch was a "traditional" roast pork leg (but really just slices of meat), and a bean salad that was frankly the star of the show, featuring much pumpkin seed oil, a local specialty. I paid for our lunch and then we rolled into town to the beer fountain - a place with 6 self-serve public taps where you buy an RFID-activate glass mug and can choose which beers to drink. We tried all 6 (they were a few ounce pours and we didn't get much drunker). On the way out we stopped for a few trains to pass before some busy highway riding, during which I managed to drop my chain on an uphill with traffic waiting behind. Kinda bummer timing but fortunately there was a place to pull off and fix and we exited the highway soon after.

Some urban riding into Celje, one of the largest Slovenian towns, where we cruised into a hostel Jeff knows the owner of, dropped our bikes and our stuff, and went wandering around town in the sunny late afternoon. Central town is carfree and a little cute, but Jeff wanted more beer and I didn't so we split up and I spent awhile sitting and people watching near the river and walking around downtown before heading back to a shower and writing this.

Slovenia is beautiful, people are kind, but I will still be glad to be home and have more space to myself...