Wednesday, June 5, 2013

Lake Bled to Villach

The original planned route was to ride from Bled up the beautiful Radovna valley. We discovered that most of the valley road was a good but unsealed, so considering how wet it had been, and with the possibility of showers, we decided on another route.
We rode from Bled, initially on a separate bike path then on a secondary road through Moste and Jesenice. We were riding along a huge glacial valley, occasionally glimpsing the beautiful milky ice-blue river. At one point Pat took a wrong turn into a village and we rode up a ridiculously steep (bottom gear, standing, barely moving) street before turning around. Good practice for later!
A bit before we reached Mojstrana an excellent separate bike path started, taking us closer to the river and through beautiful conifer and silver birch forests.
We stopped at Kranjska Gora, a ski resort and mountain biking centre, for coffee and cake, and a few km later turned off the bike path to ride over the mountain pass towards Villach.
We immediately rode past a sign warning of a windy road and grades of 18%. Tracey was so keen she kept going while I stopped to record the photographic evidence.
After passing through the unmanned border crossing into Austria, the descent was just as steep, much longer, and quite rough. The signed speed limit was 30km/h, and that was fast enough, hard on the brakes most of the way down.
We rode straight to the Villach railway station to buy our tickets to Stuttgart the next day. We were expecting to book on one train right through, as per the internet timetables. However, the floods have disrupted the trains, and the helpful lady at the ticket counter sent us away for half an hour so she could sort out a route for us. She booked us and our bikes on the 7:16 train to Salzburg, and told us to catch the next train from there to Munich, from where she said we could catch a train to Stuttgart. So it was a pretty early night for us after dinner at our hostel.

Map of our actual route so far.


2 comments:

  1. Looks like the mountains the fellowship had to cross. Very impressive.

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  2. Gawd, I am so bloody jealous! :)

    Amazing how sharply those peaks rise out of that gorgeous valley, and again with the amazingly coloured water.

    At least you have to earn it with 18% climbs!!!

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