Day 46: Slovenia

Crossing the border to Slovenia today was a relief. It is not that Croatia is not a beautiful and nice country. But the last days felt like Sisyphus crawling up a mountain with all the luggage just to role down again and start all over. Not a lot changed, the mountains and town looked similar and the heat was exhausting. So breaking the cycle was important ;)

Leaving Croatia was not as easy as expected. First I had to turn around because of a gravel path. Then I took the wrong border crossing, had to wait in a traffic jam and finally cycle back to the EuroVelo 8. But these were all minor annoyances.

Slovenia has fantastic network of cycling paths. Including the EuroVelo 8:

The signposting is also great (which did not stop me from going the wrong way a few times - you cannot blame the infrastructure for everything ;) And there are nice sites to rest in regular intervals:

As well as some interesting things to see like the salines:

And surprise: If you provide the infrastructure people cycle. I haven't seen so many cyclists since the start of my tour. The only issue? The country is to small. After 45 km in Slovenia I already crossed the border to Italy.

Almost immediatly the quality of the cycling paths detoriated and soon I was in Triest cycling the main streets. Thank you Slovenia, this was a fun and relaxing ride.

The funny thing with Triest is that the thing I associate most with the name is the Triest submarine used by Jacques Piccard to dive in the Mariana Trench. This was described in a childrens "Was-ist-Was" book our family had 40 years ago. Somehow this left a lasting impression :)

But the boat was sold to the US and is not in Triest. Still Triest is the city in Europe with the highest percentage of researchers and the city with the highest standard of living in Italy (facts stolen from wikipedia ;).

Cycling through the city was ok. Some nice buildings. Not to much traffic. But if you ask me in 40 years about it, I'll probably won't remember it.

Now I'm 10 km north of Triest. I only cycled 90 km. This is even less than yesterday and the day before. But today this was totally ok. This night there is supposed to be some rain and perhaps the temperatures drop a bit.