Day 13 - Oh well hello there new legs!

Ben

25 Sep 2025 • 3 min read

We could definitely tell we'd had a rest day, as despite the headwind rearing its ugly head again, we were over half way with 90% of the elevation done before we'd really looked at our Garmins and had barely stopped. "Can you believe we've been riding for 3 hours already?!".

The route was a nicely tarmaced winding road ascending gently into the mountains before descending into the flatlands. Apparently it can get very busy, but as we were early on a non-descript weekday it was very manageable.

And the speed just stayed high! A well timed coffee stop gave us a break from the wind, but total stoppage was low and it looked like we were going to arrive much earlier than expected and break our recent cycling-in-the-dark habit...and we actually did! Shout out to the tomato seller near Plovdiv who walked over to us as we stopped quickly for a feed to donate two beef tomatoes. People are so friendly and generous here! We managed through a combination of mime and key words to explain our plan and offer him some dried mango in return.

No horse and carts, but luckily bikes are allowed!

Horse and carts were allowed here though!

We had so much time that our 7 step Plovdiv plan for the evening actually worked! We had prebooked accommodation in order to spend the evening in this historic city:

Bike and person maintenance
Amphitheatre
Explore old town
See graffiti
Restaurant
"Non" museum
Beer on the balcony

Plovdiv

We loved it! A really cool artsy city with a lot of impressive Roman ruins. We had a great, and very healthy meal, enjoyed the old town, petted the cats, accidentally ended up at the highest point for sunset and tried not to buy everything in beautiful art galleries/shops, but the highlight was definitely the "non-museum". This is a clever concept set up by one of Anna's friends which tells the history and local customs of the city via the work of 20 local artists and lots of interactive exhibits which had us laughing and giggling (even more than usual)! It only opened three weeks ago so we were lucky. I'll let the pictures tell the rest...