The rain continues, but things are slowly getting better…

After yesterday’s rainy day, we made the mistake of choosing the cheapest hotel we could find. It was not a good experience. The room was neither clean nor warm, and even the shower was lukewarm—not completely cold, but I felt colder after showering than before, especially after such a cold and rainy day. Naturally, our clothes didn’t dry well in a room like that either.

Getting up in the morning was quite difficult, but perhaps it’s one of those life anecdotes: sometimes you have to put in a lot of effort to get out of a tough situation, but once you’re out, you’re glad you did. That’s exactly how I felt when leaving the hotel today…

Of course, the motivation to start was somewhat dampened because it was raining again this morning. So it was almost 11:45 before Shaun and I finally set off. We’ve now been traveling together for 14 days, but it doesn’t feel that long at all. At the same time, Istanbul feels like ages ago, even though we actually set off together from there just 13 days ago.

Today I didn’t repeat yesterday’s mistake and wore my rain pants from the start. We rode almost entirely on the main road D010, which we had already been on for several days. After just a few kilometers, the rain stopped for the first time. But when we took our first break after a little over 43 km, it started raining lightly again.

After the break, it felt like it took forever for me to warm up again—unfortunately, the café we were in wasn’t as well heated as the one yesterday. In reality, it probably took about 15–20 minutes before I was back to operating temperature and felt comfortable again. After that, things went really well, even though the weather wasn’t great. How far we would go also depended on the rain, as neither of us wanted to ride for hours in the rain like yesterday. Fortunately, the rain wasn’t as heavy today and eventually stopped completely. So we made it to my desired destination, the teachers’ house in Ardeşen, arriving already at 18:45, well before nightfall. We probably had a good tailwind again today…

Teachers’ houses usually offer good value for money, and that was the case today: it wasn’t the cheapest, but we had a very clean and warm room, including a hot shower and a view of the Black Sea. After a night like yesterday, I appreciated that even more.

Now there are only about 62 km left to the Georgian border, so it’s almost time to say goodbye to Turkey. That was also one reason to stay in a teachers’ house one last time. For dinner, we had Çiğ Köfte again, a Turkish specialty we had enjoyed many times over the past two weeks, and which has been vegan since new food regulations were introduced a few years ago.