May 10th, 2022
As it was a relatively short day at about 65km, we decided to have a slightly longer lie in bed, so when the alarm went off at 7:30 am, we were ready to get up.
We hadn’t unpacked much, so the repacking after breakfast was relatively quick, so goodness knows what we minced about with as it was almost 9:30 am before we set off.
It was already warming up as we pulled out of the small courtyard into the main square. The bars and restaurants that spilt out onto the square were doing well, with the town’s entire population seemingly sitting in the shade of the beer branded canopies drinking coffee and eating breakfast.
The road out of town was relatively straightforward. After a short run on busy streets, we were back on a combination of cycle lanes running alongside the road and cycle paths running along the pavement, shared with pedestrians.
Today was never going to be the most interesting, with most of the day being along the main road between Varaždin and Zagreb. The first turn we made after leaving the town ended up being a wrong one, forcing our Garmin to spend 10 minutes recirculating the route, even though we were back on the correct road within half that time, but as the GPS has proven to have a mind of it’s own on a number of occasions we allowed it to get on with it while we tootled down the road.
While a reasonable hard shoulder was available for us to cycle on much of the way, it consistently disappeared at the bottom of each of the day’s climbs, with each up being on a bendy stretch of road to keep things interesting. That said, we were always given plenty of wobble space, so we never felt in any danger.
With the reward of a couple of days off the bike waiting for us in Zagreb, we only took two rest stops during the day, one to buy a family-sized pack of ice lollies and another to enjoy lunch under the shade of a small wooded area adjacent to a bar and home to a colony of ants. The lunch stop was short.
Uphills on the Pino are a challenge in two ways. While the leg part is much easier since we replaced the Rohloff seventeen tooth sprocket with a twenty-one tooth one, down in the lower gears, we aren’t moving fast, although our legs are spinning like a spinny thing, so the challenge becomes keeping 210kg of bike heading uphill in a straight line. As we passed through our final town before Zagreb on our last climb of the day, the steering veered sharply to the right, resulting in the front tyre hitting the curb, which resulted in our first flat of the tour. We pulled over into a shaded area next to a garage to assess the damage. Unable to identify anything sharp in the tyre or even the hole in the tube, I switched the tube out with a spare, and we kept our fingers crossed and carried on. The tube remained inflated, and we finished the day without issue, with another job added to the list of things to sort out over the next two days.
The apartment we had booked for our two-day break was less than 500m off the main road we had been following all day, so not difficult to locate.
The owner had said we could store the tandem in the apartment, which is about the size of our kitchen back home, but with some rearrangement of furniture, we managed to get everything in, stored away and found ourselves relaxing before 5 pm.
With a small supermarket next door, we did a quick shop for pizza ingredients and beer, then settled down to Prime Video movie, with Deborah falling asleep before the opening credits.
