Hello Montenegro!

What a great few days cycling we’ve had: gorgeous, steady mountainous climbs & beautiful descents, Croatia’s coastline and a new milestone reached: tonight we rolled into Montenegro.

We’ve made a couple school girl/boy errors…firstly we didn’t take enough water on a wildcamp and ended up cycling 7 miles uphill the next day with limited supplies! Secondly, upon arriving in Montenegro we realised we didn’t have a scrap of mobile data between us and no credit to call or text. Out of the EU we don’t have our usual contracts, of course!

It took us half an hour to find our accommodation and we reverted to using co-ordinates, offline maps, then we took a step back into the proper olden days and spoke to someone who promptly pointed us in the right direction! 🤣 I joke…a bit, but seriously it’s lovely having to rely on people. I enjoy the process of speaking with people, figuring problems out and the awkward moments of trying to understand each other! It’s far too easy to find alternative ways to sort things out these days! All the missed opportunities. Google will never excite me.

Finally – we were lazy today, these late starts are getting a bit habitual… we set off at 12 and went straight for food – 1pm bums were on saddles. We made tracks to Dubrovnik which looks like a great place! Don’t do what we did; don’t drop into Dubrovnik and leave within hours. Dubrovnik needs to be explored! It’s not suitable for bikes and especially not heavy touring bikes. Book a place, dump the bikes and enjoy Old Town Dubrovnik in all its glory.

One final thing, to give you a giggle…when we started this trip I was SO GOOD at appreciating that for people we meet, English will be their second language. This means, speaking good, standard English is critical (in most cases) for an easy conversation…there’s no point in speaking at my usual tempo (very quick) or dropping in awful slang like my glottal stop (not pronouncing t’s) dropped h’s, gonnas and innits – I’ve obviously fallen back into this because on 2 occasions I’ve been asked to speak English! 😳 oops!!

Today was a great day! We pressed on, arrived in Montenegro and reclaimed an accomplishment after a late start! 🤗