I Don’t Think It’s Possible To Do The Frustrations Of Today Justice…

From today we are leaving the north coast of Turkey (for now) and heading inland. Over the next few days we’re anticipating a lot of climbing.

With this in mind we’ve been considering a rest day. Partly to rest legs, but mainly because we’re very tired and Stew’s got a cold. Mornings are a struggle at the moment.

6 days off in Istanbul totally flipped our routine; early mornings and early nights became late nights and leisurely starts.

We find that once we’re on the bike we’re fine, but starting late morning isn’t any good really, you just end up cycling the hottest part of the day. 🥵

We cycled 7 miles to the next town, Eregil and we were feeling great! Although it seemed counter intuitive and although we didn’t manage to secure a warmshowers host we decided to stop for a rest in Eregil after some deliberations.

Weirdly we couldn’t find any hotels online, but there were plenty in the town. We shrugged this off and carried on. We wondered from hotel to hotel until someone had a room for 120TL (£18). We had turned down a couple of really unpleasant hotels and a couple extortionate ones, so this one for £18 seemed good! We were told to come back at 2pm when the room would be ready.

We spent the next 3 hours on the grass, in the shade next to the coast. Stew fixed a substantial issue with my bike which entailed taking the back wheel off and re-doing the cable for the gear shifter and I wrote a blog post. It was productive and the location beautiful. We went back to the hotel, late I admit – the room had gone. In fact every room in the town had gone unless we wanted to pay £40. A big festival was taking place. Oh crap. Optimistic we tried a couple of other hotels, but frustrations grew.

We were both demoralised, holding out heads in hands as we figured out next step. It sounds dramatic I know but at the time it felt so bad!! One of those days where you really feel the frustration of being without a home to go back to.

It was 4pm before we accepted that we had no where to stay. There were about 40 hilly miles between us and the next town and we weren’t mentally prepared for it, but tough….we had to leave this town unless we wanted to sleep in the street!

With one option left we loaded the panniers with food and water and jumped back onto our bikes. We had no choice but to…hopefully…find a camp spot…at some point…

25 tough miles later…pushed my bike up a hill tough…we rolled up to a spot that we deemed “good enough”. We pitched the tent and cooked a meal. In terms of location (it’s beautiful!) temperature and bugs this place is as good as it gets.

I’m now lay in our tent as I write this and I couldn’t be happier.

I love being in this tent and it’s even better now we can pitch the inner tent! It’s much cooler 👌🏼

As Stew said today, the most important thing with cycle touring is that the bike will keep moving. That way, in the worst case, you’ll just do more miles than you want to.

We always carry 2-4 meals in the panniers and extra litres of water. We’ve always got a back up. We’ve always got our tent.

At one point, to break the tension I also said “at least we have each other”. We laughed, but it is true. Things are a lot easier when you can share your frustrations with a loved one.