Day 12: First day in Romania

After crossing the border yesterday evening today was my first full day in Romania. The first challenge was to leave Satu-Mare (no "Mare" though). The main bridge wasn't allowed for bikes and the "cycling path" was so narrow, that my bike did not physically fit in. But I could cross on the next bridge.

Afterwards navigation became fairly simple: Please follow the road for 44km. Wow. And the next one for 30km. That's easy. Road quality was also ok. From the amount of EU-flags I saw, a lot of money seems to be invested in infrastructure by the EU. In Romania there seem to be vast differences in wealth. Some houses are modern and well kept and some are near breakdown and people live in very simple conditions. Also there are quite some horse carriages used for every day purposes. Some of the horses are afraid of velomobiles, so I try to keep a distance.

What is becoming a nuisance are police controls. Today I was stopped two times. "You cannot drive on the road, it's to dangerous" - "But there is no cycling path, where else should I cycle?" - "Do you have documents for the vehicle?" - "No, there are no documents for bicycles." - "It only one mirror!" - "Most bicycles have none at all." - "Do you have insurance?" - "For a bicycle? No". After that she took my ID card and phoned someone in the car. And I was allowed to cycle on. It's all very friendly, but every time I see a police car I now expect them to stop me. The second police man could not speak english. So we talked a bit without communicating a lot. He took a photo and once again I could cycle on. 

At the end of the day I decided to cross one more "hill" (500m altitude), so I will not face two of them tomorrow. But at the end of the day this was hard.
Somehow cycling mountains is always the same: They show up in the mist at the horizon. As you get nearer they get big and menacing. Then suddenly this valley shows up that you haven't noticed before and everything seems to be ok for some time, there is some gradient, but nothing serious. Until you get to the end of the valley and have to cross the ridge. At that point things suddenly get interesting.

In this case this meant climbing 200m. The gradient was so steep, that I could cycle it, but not without taking breaks. And when I reached the top I saw this:

The funny thing: When I cycled up there the red part of the romanian flag in the background was not yet visible. So I saw a sign saying goodbye and the ukrainian colors. For a moment I was unsure if I could have gone so wrong and cycled to the ukrainian border. But that is actually quite far away. Still I was quite relieved when the red part finally became visible.

The rest was 30km downhill in the evening sun. That part was quite nice.

Tomorrow I have only 120km (and one hill) left to Breaza where the velomobile factory is. This should be a somewhat relaxed part. Wednesday I'll probably take a break from cycling and try to get everything fixed.