Day 29 - The Great Bakery Raid

This one is a long one, but a good I promise, stuff just kept happening! Also sorry for any typos - I typed a lot while cycling to try and keep up with the days events!

After coming off of the road and back into a field at some speed while trying to cycle along and knock the mud from my cleats at the same time, I decided to stop and bash away in a manner not dissimilar to removing snow from a ski boot. Once fixed, it was on with the usual mile eating to get to the first food eating! We made good time along some quiet roads and gravel tracks, cruising along enjoying our positive elevation from yesterday and the favourable winds.

It made a welcome change from the main road, but we were Hungry (capital H) by the time we arrived. After finding a bakery selling only giant bread we thought we'd try our luck at the next one. What followed was a coordinated attack on the bakeries supplies and the baker's sanity. I'll try and break it down for you:

The Great Bakery Raid

Having over-bought attractive but not brilliant, or samey items in past bakeries we went in with a two step plan.

Step 1: Scout and Scoff

Sitrep: Ten hundred hours. Bakery infiltrated. Modus operandi: innocent perusal. Secondary objective: exchange some translate to find veggie stuff.

Mission objective: order a modest quantity - suggested load: a couple of pasties, a loaf of bread, two cakes, maybe a biscuit and a baklava. Retreat to the sun and devour.

Mission report: We were made early. Perhaps it was the English, perhaps the lycra, perhaps because we bought 6 times more than average. Nonetheless it was a success. Contents are magical! Round pain au chocolate. "Its chocolate not cheese! It's chocolate!" (We're a bit fed up of oily cheese filo). The rest was very good and devoured quickly. I even had a pasty. Price: incredible

Step 2: Clean them out

Mission Briefing: Go for the jugular. Empty the stocks. Clean them out.

Mission Report: The attendant couldn't quite believe it and we created an enormous queue, but mission success.

Step 3: The Cake

Objective: Buy the cake. "We can't...can we?"

The Result

• 1 spinach pastry log
• 1 round spinach pastry
• 1 pastie
• 1 potato pastie
• 3 Nutella biscuits
• 4 ring pain au chocolate
• 1 salt, 1 nut savoury filo pastry
• 1 dark seeded loaf
• 1 pink velvet cake
• 1 chocolate desert
• 2 smartie biscuits
• 1 giant chocolate cake
• 2 backlava (free - given to keep us going while we shopped I guess)
• 1 honey doughnut
• 1 fruit scone

Total Cost: 20.84 euros

So if you want a great bakery and find yourself in Eastern Turkey - here you go!

Now that should power us through 200kms on the dry day before the snow 😏

We stopped to look at a cool castle in Ezurum. It generally seems like a cool city (from our brief pass-through) with a nice vibe like Bursa - old city and university, except Ezurum also has a ski resort and a great bakery! While trying to get a picture we, or really I, sas assailed by 6 young women. We had a fun conversation which ended shortly after I narrowly managed to avoid marrying not only myself, but also Luke and Joe!

They spoke some English, but were so overexcited they kept talking in Turkish and not realising 😅. Suffice to say Emma was left alone except for one who wanted a hug from her! Still single (just) we got back on the road.

We lorry-surfed the afternoon (a cycling bucketlist item for me!). Lorry-surfing? It's when you wait for a slow lorry to overtake or join the motorway and then put down absolute maximum, bar-wrenching, full sprint power to get in its slipstream. When it works you then go along at close to 70km/h!

The Cowherd and the Donkey

The next stop on the agenda was tea and cake. We hadn't exactly made 200km day progress thanks to the distractions, but in Turkey when a cow herd sees you on the road and runs across the field shouting "Chai! (tea)" you don't say no. He was very enthusiastic and we learnt a lot about his life while sharing tea and trying to eat enough of the food offered to not offend while not actually eating his modest lunch! We felt bad when sharing the cake that we felt was cheap, while he kept saying about how expensive it was, but we all enjoyed it and finally managed to give something back! Then he suggested I ride his donkey.

This involved running after the thing that clocked me a mile off until he eventually fetched it for me and I rode off majestically into the sunset (I could not steer the thing!). Just standard 200km cycling day stuff really.

Sadly in the meantime he started hitting on Emma, and unfortunately things turned weird as he got fixated on the fact we weren't married, told us how many kids we should be having (10) and so we took that as our queue to go (and then stop shortly after to actually eat some food and get given another tea while doing so outside of a garage). From now on we're married we've decided, curious to see what the first day of married life is like tomorrow!

The day was firmly derailed but the tailwinds and straight fast road were a joy and allowed us to get our minumum. Unfortunately, we did have a bad experience towards the evening. As we've got further East people have been asking more and more about how much the bikes cost and we had the first person try to fleece us for fruit. We've generally felt its so safe here that we can leave our bikes briefly outside places (often with the alarm on) while getting shopping, etc, especially as there are no big shops so we can easily see the bikes. We keep an eye on them but generally are relaxed. Today while I stopped in a small shop to get some dinner stuff and Emma kept going for efficiency, I noticed a guy spot and then beeline for my bike. I was trapped at the entrance which I couldn't get out of so had to sprint around the whole shop, sliding in my cleats past checkouts, throwing my shopping down. Luckily when he saw me sprinting towards the exit creating quite the scene with murder in my eyes he put it back and pretended not to be stealing it. One b***ard letting down a country, watched by two staff members one who was either helping him or me I couldn't tell. Left me surprisingly shaken (that bike is life right now), but lesson learned that we'll always leave a guard from now. Even when the punishment for stealing is very severe, even when they love tourists and even though you could never sell a bike like that here (we've not seen a road cyclist in five countries) that much relative money on wheels is too tempting.

We went a long way from that town before camping for the night!

Food spend today: 39.35 euros