Day 31 - It's Snowing!

We had a lie in, knowing it was going to be grim and the tent was well hidden. After an extensive breakfast and pack up inside the tent we opened the door...to snow! Beautiful, but cold, very cold.

The first climb was on snowy roads. Again stunningly beautiful, but stunningly cold! Since Emma's happiness is directly correlated with the temperature, she wasn't having an amazing time I don't think (-2 degrees). To our amazement and great relief the border is a) indoors and b) has a cafe and shopping centre! Designed for cyclists! It is at 2000m elevation to be fair, but usually there's nothing so we were pretty chuffed. We had two rounds of meals and tea in "nomansland" and defrosted. The meals were expensive, but required, and we got a free pudding so we're npt complaining.

Bye bye Turkey - you've been awesome and friendly and beautiful and crazy - we'll miss you!

There are two types of border guards in my experience; the jobsworth, self-important ones that want to show you they're in charge and the funny ones who love a laugh. The Georgian border guards were the former, decidedly the former. Nothing we did was right, or fast enough, and usually earned a displeased huff and a scowl. I had to take my sign off and Emma her Turkey patch. Then we had the passports checked by a second station. Finally, we were through - we realised afterwards that Tigre wasn't wearing his border crossing glasses which is probably why it was a difficult one 😉.

Another timezone crossed to great celebration, until we realised that since we're rising and sleeping with the sun anyway, it doesn't magically give us more light, just changes the numbers...

In Georgia the weather improved and the roads deteriorated. I was kept very happy by numberplate spotting - Kazak, Tajik, Uzbek, Czech, Armenian, Ukrainian, Romanian, Moldova and a really fun one that was going too fast to see. Lots of Russians too...

The roads turned to gravel which turned to very muddy clay which clogged our wheels and necessitated 10metres of cycling to 10mins of clearing mud. Progress crawled, and as we changed our plans from blasting to the capital to instead catching a later flight from Kutaisi to see more of Georgia, we decided to stay in the nearest town and shacked up in a very nice hotel (with washing machine!) for 20 euros!

Before we arrived at the hotel we stopped to wash the bikes as we thought we'd otherwise be denied entry and they were barely moving because of mud! We didn't have any coins, but a kindly Georgian washing his car covered us. We were grateful but as you'll know from yesterday had a lot of chocolate on board so were able to give him some fancy chocolate in return. A good trade - he had money and no chocolate and we had dirty bikes and no money!

We then caused carnage in the supermarket with muddy shoes, but actually weren't the source of the carnage at the lively restaurant hosting a birthday party where we went to try some traditional food. We were blocked from ordering more, but don't worry -we'd forseen this occurance and had pre-dinner before we went.

Not many miles today, but boy were they hard fought!

Food spend today: 59.21 euros