This morning at 09:10 there was a knock on the room door, and Shaun and I were both still in bed—not exactly early risers. The message was clear: checkout was at 09:15. I wasn’t quite that fast, but shortly after half past nine I had packed everything and left the room. Shaun was clearly faster than me…

Since there was no breakfast at the teachers’ house here, we went to the nearest restaurant and ordered something warm to eat. That turned out to be a good decision, as it was raining and the forecast predicted rain for the entire day.

By the time we finally set off, it was already around 11:15—the rain was still light at that point. So I decided not to put on my rain pants yet. That turned out to be a mistake. Even though the rain was light, I soon started to feel a bit cold. Shaun felt the same, so after 28 km we took a break in a café. It was nice and warm there—I think the air conditioning was set to 30 degrees, though it didn’t quite reach that. The hot drink and the wool blanket quickly made me feel comfortable again. I kept an eye on my bike the whole time, although probably no one here would know what to do with it anyway.

Before continuing, I finally put on my new rain pants, which my dear Jiabin had brought to me in Istanbul. She paid for them using a voucher from my Bbc colleagues—many thanks again for the generous gift, I definitely needed it today. By the way, the new frame bag I’ve had since Istanbul was also paid for with that gift card. Since then, my bike no longer wobbles strangely like it did with the old frame bag. Canyon makes great bikes, but there’s still some room for improvement when it comes to accessories. The old frame bag broke after about two weeks while I was in Serbia, and it kept coming loose from the frame—the QuickLock system is a cool idea but doesn’t really work well. Those were the main reasons for buying a new one. The fact that the wobbling—making riding hands-free impossible—is now gone is an added bonus.

Despite all the rain, I even had a bit of fun today—it’s actually quite amusing to ride in the rain. Days like this are definitely part of the adventure. As long as I’m not cold, the rain doesn’t really bother me. And thanks to the new rain pants, I was now comfortably warm and could regulate my temperature nicely using the zipper of my rain jacket.

Originally, we wanted to take another break after about two-thirds of the ride, but now I didn’t want to stop as long as I was warm. Shaun felt the same. So we agreed to ride all the way to Trabzon. Also, after about 80 km, the rain stopped. The last 20 km or so were through dense city traffic, which inevitably reminded me of Istanbul. Trabzon isn’t quite that big, but with over 800,000 inhabitants, it’s still a fairly large city. After Shaun cleaned the mud off his bike at a car wash—the roads were quite dirty in places, though my fenders kept most of the dirt off my bike—we arrived at our hotel shortly after 5:30.

Oh, and luckily we had a tailwind the whole day—otherwise it wouldn’t just have been more uncomfortable, it would also have taken longer.