#roadsideplums

Some day I hope to write up the detailed route (I want to clean up our draft map before sharing, based on a lot of changes we made on the fly), and add notes on sights, food, and stays that could be helpful to anyone else traveling here, but for now I'll share a few photos and an overall summary:

For a variety of reasons, we decided to cycle in the much less visited Eastern Slovenia (which doesn’t have the postcard-highlight sites of the Julian Alps or Ljubljana), starting in Maribor, Slovenia’s second-largest city. We'd read about a popular cycling route along the Drava river nearby that we knew we wanted to include.

I spent more hours than I want to admit digging into regional bike maps, tourist agency recommendations, and other peoples’ individual trip reports (and mail-ordered a few maps from Europe to assist with planning), and eventually stitched together an interesting route where we’d ride out to the Austrian border, down the Mura river to Legrad and its confluence with the Drava river, then back up the Drava into Slovenia to the famous old town of Ptuj, before turning West to a national park, castles, and our third river. This was our planned route, with a few longer-vs-shorter options depending how we felt on a given day and how tough the hils were in practice:

Some of the sources I found especially useful in this planning, or integrated partial routes from:

* Mura River route (example writeups: https://visit-prlekija.eu/en/cycling-and-hiking-trails/the-mura-cycling-route and https://www.steiermark.com/de/Steiermark/Aktiv-in-der-Natur/Rad-Bike/Murradweg )

* Drava / Drau River cycling route: (https://www.drauradweg.com/en/sections/ and https://dravabike.si/en/info/drava-cycling-route  )

* Slovenia "Green Gourmet" route (we used a few days of this route in Eastern Slovenia) (https://www.slovenia-green.si/members/slovenia-green-gourmet-route/)

* Slovenia "Green Wellness" route (we copied a few stages of it from Maribor, as a very roundabout but more scenic and low-traffic way to get from Maribor to the Mura river) (https://www.slovenia-green.si/members/slovenia-green-wellness-route/)

* Some Maribor local cycle loops to consider as warmup / shakedown rides the day we arrived (https://www.visitmaribor.si/en/what-to-do/active-holiday/cycling/cycling-routes/)

* Eurovelo 13: the Iron Curtain Route (https://en.eurovelo.com/ev13)

One of my personal goals has been to do more touring on gravel and dirt roads with less traffic, and these parts of Slovenia and Croatia certainly delivered... even more than we expected, in some cases:

Touring Style:

We did this tour as a fully self-supported trip, similar to our Berlin-Copenhagen ride: we carried all our gear, did all our own planning, but stayed in hotels so we didn’t need to carry camping gear as well. Rather than bring my bike from home (which I prefer to do when possible, but was less practical since I had some non-cycling vacation just before this), I rented a bike here from Cycling United Ljubljana. I highly recommend them-- they were very helpful with tips and accommodating of some special requests (for example, I was able to pay them extra to drive the bike to Maribor for the start of our tour because I had some tight transportation logistics, and I was able to arrange to leave the bike for them to pick up in the luggage storage at my Ljubljana hotel at the end of the trip rather than lug it out to their shop on the outskirts of the city).

During the Berlin-Copenhagen ride we had only been booking hotels one night ahead, based on how far we wanted to ride the next day, the weather, and potential detours like spending a few hours at the chalk cliffs of Møns Klint. This gave us amazing day-to-day flexibility which I've only experienced in self-supported camping tours, but we sometimes had to compromise on hotels or ride faster/farther to make it to a hotel in a different town because all the hotels in our area were booked (especially on a holiday weekend). And researching small hotels/apartments/B&Bs that weren't listed on the big-name hotel booking sites like Booking/Hotels/AirBNB/VRBO (believe it or not, there are quite a few!) was a bit more of a pain on our phones with spotty reception while traveling vs. with a laptop at home.

For this trip, since we were traveling during the height of tourist season, we decided to book all our hotels ahead– after we came up with the overall route, we broke it down into what we thought would be management days depending on the hills, paved vs. gravel roads, and specific places that sounded interesting to spend the night (as examples: the famous old town of Ptuj, a farmstay near the Austrian border, or a specific vineyard rental house with a hot tub):

In Conclusion:

Overall, it was an amazing tour (I know I often say that, but it was). Some of the scenery was understated-agricultural-- vast fields of sunflowers and pumpkins (which made sense as we ate food made with pumpkin seed oil), chill gravel roads past farms and forests, and paths atop the walls of manmade lakes. But we also had dramatic castles on (very steep) hills, swiftly-flowing rivers, and twisty roads past shrines and monuments.

The trip also had its fair set of challenges to work through together, as expected for planning a tour somewhere neither of us had ever been. Some gravel roads were so loose or bumpy that what was intended to be a shorter day was still tiring (and hard on the wrists / knees). We were also there at the tail end of a regional heat wave with 90F+ temperatures and dark black asphalt that radiated heat upwards, and I had to refill my water multiple times a day and take stops in shady parks to recover (later in the trip, we planned late, long lunches as ways to beat the heat).

One planned bridge was just... completely gone, just concrete piers sticking out of the water. Fortunately, we'd already been suspicious of the discrepancy between online maps and a physical billboard we'd seen that morning, while small arrows on numbered signs in the ground said yet something else. Earlier, we'd diverted into a network of gravel paths that weren't on most online maps and ended up here, on the proper side of the bridge-- if we'd blindly followed google/apple maps, we would have ended up on the other side of the canal, stuck and scratching our heads:

And one night, we got into our town so late that all the markets and restaurants were closed, and we had to ride on to our rental house, a bit stressed and hungry as it was getting dark. But we found a solitary roadside ice cream stand to lift our spirits, then improvised a meal from all the snacks we had on us plus a supporting "soup" made from just water, pumpkin seed oil, and flour found in the rental house kitchen, and it all worked out.

Every trip, I learn a little bit more about how people (including myself) handle adversity, in my never-ending journey toward ideal Expedition Behavior, but that could be a whole other story.

We had just as many unplanned and positive experiences-- for example, we diverted from our preplanned route when it was hours of straight pavement between corn fields (shades of RAGBRAI...) to a route we saw signs for, not sure how bikeable it would be (one online map classified it as a hiking trail). And it was a lovely gravel road along the banks of the Mura river and through a forest, featuring dozens of informational plaques about hydrology, history, and a floating sawmill.

We also went swimming at stops along the road multiple times.. slept in an actual castle... had a three-course dinner at a farm with some of the best chicken and potatoes I've had, for 10 Euros (including wine!)... saw some great museums of traditional costumes, musical instruments, and weapons... made short across-a-river detours to Austria and Hungary because we could (including passing a former Iron Curtain border crossing that's long-abandoned and a bit creepy)... foraged roadside fruit... and saw a variety of interesting birds. I’ll look back at this trip for a long time...