Distance: 92 km
Time: 4 hrs 23 min.
Speed: 20.8 km/hr
Climbed: 723 ft
AHR (Average Heart Rate) 91 bts/min
Cum Distance: 647 km
Cum Climbed: 4324 ft.
Punctures: 0
Quick breakfast and out onto the road at 7.20 only to realise I had no glasses. Back to search; no luck so had to retrieve a back-up from my daily bag (not actually loaded yet).
Only a few km and a roundabout or two in the early morning light before we came to the border with Romania. We were there for the early shift.....29 cyclists coming through with all types of passports. (Romania not in Schengen area, so passports must be shown at the border). At least no other vehicles coming through. Each passport was checked a number of times.
Next stop was at currency exchange; not the first one (with a much lower rate) but one that gave top rate with no commission. Here I changed Hungarian forints into Romanian lei (a better rate than I got at home before I left). 1 Euro = 4.35 Lei here.
The cost of a litre of diesel is much the same as at home and the cost of soft drinks is quite low also.
We have also moved into Eastern European Time (2 hours ahead of Ireland). But temperatures are still high hitting 38 deg for most of the cycling day and Romania doesn’t have roadside pumps.
For the first 30 km our group had swollen to 6...we had Cathy’s nephew Ben in our company. He had come through border and currency conversion with Cathy. After about 30 km he pulled away....his natural speed would be stunted by our style.
We are still on the same fertile plain as the last two days with plenty of those sunflowers again in large tracts.
As we progressed crops gave way to open tracts of (burned up) grass with flocks of sheep being tended by shepherds and their dogs. After passing Ineu at 70 km small fields appeared together with undulating countryside. Also the mountains appeared ahead of us (but they will be for tomorrow).
At this point we are moving up into the gentle valley of the Crisul Alba river; a river that changes name to Koros when it enters Hungary before joining the Danube.
Visible from the road were occasional blasts from the past...pikes of hay having been saved totally by hand, horse carts on the road and long horned cows sheltering under trees or being led to the field.
Most of today we followed Highway 79A. Immediately inside the border crossing the surface was perfect and we wondered how long it would last. In fact it lasted all day except for a rough 5 km stretch before Cherelus. The recumbents had a ball of a day on these roads. Hope they last into the mountains.
Our campsite is a few km on the far side of Buteni so a quick visit to the local store to fill up the tuck box and an ice-cream. It’s a nice tidy site by the river and dinner tonight was pizza in Sandra’s Pizzeria. Still hot at 8 o’clock as people begging to turn in.
Thank God for the health and thank God for the energy.














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