Day 2 - Gelibolu
Sometimes you have to tailor your expectations and modify your goals. Today was a great day for biking but we suffered a couple minor setbacks.
We left Tekirdağ after a köfte breakfast recommended to us by our host - she had done the meat inspection for them and said they had excellent standards.
The first setback was that the maps we had created did not load properly onto the GPS. I had part of it memorized but was unsure about the end and we may have taken a longer route with more hills.
That brings me to the second setback, mountains. We climbed about 1700 meters (1.1 miles).We had spectacular views from the top. It was just the time to get there was longer than on flat roads.
Mylene climbing a brutal hill.
Lastly, we experienced quite a downpour, which turned into a nice experience, but a delay as well. We have rain gear but this was a deluge with enormous thunder and lightning right overhead. I stopped under a tree to put on a rain jacket and a man signaled me to put my bike under his deck and sit down. He brought us water and Turkish tea (çay) and we managed to converse about him and his family (his two sons who live abroad in Strasbourg and Miami) and tell him about ourselves and our trip. It was about an hour until the rain let up enough to leave. We thanked him for his kindness and continued.
Şeref, cutting Mylène a rose from his garden.
For most of the day, the roads hugged the coast, even through the hills. For one stretch we rode through several fishing villages with fishing cabins perched precariously along the beach.
But in the end we did not make it to Gelibolu and our couchsurfer, by nightfall we were 20km away in Koru, having ridden 110km. We still thoroughly enjoyed the ride and have a significantly shorter route tomorrow to get to Çanakkale.
We left Tekirdağ after a köfte breakfast recommended to us by our host - she had done the meat inspection for them and said they had excellent standards.
The first setback was that the maps we had created did not load properly onto the GPS. I had part of it memorized but was unsure about the end and we may have taken a longer route with more hills.
That brings me to the second setback, mountains. We climbed about 1700 meters (1.1 miles).We had spectacular views from the top. It was just the time to get there was longer than on flat roads.
Mylene climbing a brutal hill.
Lastly, we experienced quite a downpour, which turned into a nice experience, but a delay as well. We have rain gear but this was a deluge with enormous thunder and lightning right overhead. I stopped under a tree to put on a rain jacket and a man signaled me to put my bike under his deck and sit down. He brought us water and Turkish tea (çay) and we managed to converse about him and his family (his two sons who live abroad in Strasbourg and Miami) and tell him about ourselves and our trip. It was about an hour until the rain let up enough to leave. We thanked him for his kindness and continued.
Şeref, cutting Mylène a rose from his garden.
For most of the day, the roads hugged the coast, even through the hills. For one stretch we rode through several fishing villages with fishing cabins perched precariously along the beach.
But in the end we did not make it to Gelibolu and our couchsurfer, by nightfall we were 20km away in Koru, having ridden 110km. We still thoroughly enjoyed the ride and have a significantly shorter route tomorrow to get to Çanakkale.
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