Do you remember that we 2-3 weeks ago complained about having forgotten our foldable plastic coffee cups at home?

I am happy to tell that the problem now is solved…..

Özlem and Volkan had a got a picnic set from a friend who has plenty of such sets at work to hand out as souvenirs from his company so they could easily get a replacement set. We were very happy for the gift but only accepted one to save weight and space. The new cup is insulated and will keep our coffee hot if it starts to snow again or the beer cold if it is too hot. Let’s hope for the latter being what is going to happen….

Özlem provided us with food to heat for dinner before we left her. We got ”dolmas” (stuffed paprikas/peppers), spagetti and pieces of fried meat left over from the previous dinner. Since the guys at the gas station offered us dinner yesterday, we still hadn’t started to eat all the food we had so we decided to have dolmas and spagetti as breakfast.

We heated the dolmas and spaggeti on our stove and then enjoyed them together with coffee. Thanks for the breakfast Özlem and also thanks a lot for enabling us to drink coffee in the mornings again.

In all other gas stations we have visited there is one guy who works with cleaning cars. The car is sprayed with some white foam that I believe is some kind of car shampoo. In Sweden we need to use degreaser to get rid of salt stains from the road and I have for some time wondered if this shampo maybe contains some degreaser.

Last time I changed chains was in Elhovo in Bulgaria some 800 km ago so now it was time again. Cleaning chains is a dirty job and one good way to find out if the car shampoo had degreaser in it was to try to use it. I put the dirty chains on the ground at the cleaning station and let the guy spray them.

The chains moved around as frightened snakes when the guy sprayed them with his high pressure water hose and we had to stand on one end each to prevent them from moving around. The guy was wearing rubber boots while I had shoes on that got wet.
For your information I can now tell that the shampoo contains absolutely no degreaser. Our chains are still covered by the mix of oil and dust we wanted to get rid of and I need to find some degreaser or diesel to wash them in instead.

We bought a loaf of bread in a town and put it on my rear rack to eat with the fried meat at some beautiful place when we got hungry. As usual we got hungry at a gas staion…. When we rolled in to a little station the single man working there pointed where the toilets were and when we came back he asked:

”chai?” (tea)

We sat down in an empty room that had been a shop but now was used as staff room. The man immediately heated tea and we could enjoy our lunch sandwiches with hot tea.

The afternoon was hot, but it had one very pleasant thing – a strong tailwind. This wind was very much appreciated since we were slowly climbing up to higher altitudes but most of all we enjoyed it in the tunnels.

Between the town of Yenice and the city of Karabük, there is a section with tunnels. The man at the gas station had informed us that there would be 15 of them. We have mixed feelings for tunnels. They are difficult to cycle in if there is a lot of traffic, but if they weren’t where they are we would be going up and down the hills like yo-yos while we now can ride straight trough.

Bring a Sunday afternoon it was very little traffic on the road so it was easy to pass them. The wind that gets compressed and can be strong in a tunnel was on our way and we passed most of them in a high speed.

We wanted to know how many tunnels there were and Wej counted them while I added their total length from the signs in front of each of them. The longest was 750 meters and the shortest only 39.

Number of tunnels: 16
Total distance: 4081 m.

When arriving in the city of Karabük Wej suddenly remembered that Özlem had adviced us to visit the nearby town of Safranbulo which has a historical center with old wooden houses that is declared as a world heritage by UNESCO. We had forgot about this and hadn’t checked any information about it, but we turned left to go there anyway. Had we known what kind of uphill it was to Safranbulo, we would definately had skipped visiting the town and continued along the planned route… 😉

Since it was late in the afternoon and plenty of guesthouses we decided to change the plan from camping to indoor sleeping instead. We found a guesthouse, negotiated the price and then put our stuff in our room and took our bikes and rolled down the steep slope to the historical city center where we looked around and sat down to have a coffee and beer at a little cafe.