Day 19: Somewhere in Rumania

The day started in a good way with fast cycling (after I had succeeded in explaining BRouter which path I liked to take). The sky was finally a bit overcast and less heat made cycling easier.

But then it started to rain a bit and the air got really humid. I still have to learn that rain in the south doesn't mean it gets colder. 

The lunch break suffered from limited food supply. North of the mountains I always found supermarkets everything I needed. But here every village has a "magazine". These are small and often have a very limited supply of fresh products. Also I struggle to find any juice. There is always all kind of soft drinks. A healthy diet becomes hard to come by.

In the afternoon I ran into all kinds of bad road issues. In Romania a road seems to be always replaced by a gravel road in its full length, before it gets paved again. 

The routing software offered some smaller roads through a village to get around some of the gravel path. But that part of the village was a utterly poor part and the "road" was a gravel path. A boy started pushing my velomobile by grabbing the top light without asking. Which is not a very good part to apply force to. He wanted money for the pushing and I wanted him to stop immediatly, before something broke. In the end I cycled of. Poverty in Romania is a real problem, but giving people money for harassing you is no solution for that :( Not a very nice experience.  

Back on the initial road I fought with more than 10km of gravel only to run into the next construction side a few kilometers further down the path. That was the moment I decided to go back onto the major road. 

Later as I headed toward my accomodation the road suddenly became a pothole infested path. This also sometimes happen. I have no idea if the data from OpenStreetMap is not good enough, but you cannot recognize from the map, how bad the road will be.

So again I wanted to go back to the main road, but on the way there I still had to cross this bridge:

The car before me only made it up the river bank in the second try with spinning wheels. Seeing that I decided that pushing the bike is probably the safer approach.

I still haven't found a good way to plan the route. The main roads are stressfull with all the traffic and the smaller roads often start out nice, but end up very bad.