Lost and Found

Riding Jacket

What is my riding jacket doing sitting in the middle of a grassy trail in Bulgaria you may ask. Well it is a long story that reminds me a bit of what happens when you play a Country Song in reverse - You get your house back, you get your pickup truck back and inevitably your girlfriend too.

After having come from Turkey and spent way too much time on good paved roads it was time to get back onto some fun dirt but I had not completely anticipated what havoc the recent heavy rains had caused.

Washed out

After a steep climb that took nearly an hour on what looked like a washed out river bed but was in fact a road, I came out on a ridge. From there it looked like the trail was a little flatter as it moved back into forest, but as it became less defined and muddier and slipperyer (
 is that a word ) my struggles really began.

With the temperature and humidity in the forest were way up there and after numerous "offs" the trail kinda faded out. Picking up a fully loaded moto in muddy conditions often entails removing the panniers to reduce the weight but after doing this many times I was rapidly running out of energy. I decided to turn around and find another way out of the area. This is what I found

My kinda trail

Back down into the valley after 20 km of riding on tracks like the picture above restored my spirits a little but as I came into the town of Varshets my engine did a huge backfire and quit on me. Luckily this was right outside a very much communist era hotel that I checked into after filling out a long form for international guests. Getting my muddy bags off the bike and into the hotel I discovered that somehow my riding jacket was no longer strapped to the side of one of the bags. These jackets are used not only for protection against the elements but also for protection in case of a fall and are not an inexpensive piece of equipment. I was not happy - hot, tired, mud covered, leg cramps from dehydration, no jacket and a motorcycle that in my mind was now F***ed.

Sunflowers

There is always something to cheer me up and thinking back on the day there was a lot of good riding and some amazing sights like the fields of sunflowers that are cultivated throughout this region. Once in a better mood I started to research online into the possible cause of my bike problem. I came upon a forum with an obscure post from about two years before where a rider had what seemed to be a similar problem where the rubber engine intake had become loose, taken in air, and blew off the throttle body when it backfired. 

The next morning early I was up and had the bike apart and put back together before breakfast and had it running like a charm. I then looked back on photos from the day before and could see at what point I still had my jacket on the bike. I rode back about and hour and a half to the point in the forest where it got really slippery and then walked for about twenty minutes and there it was in the middle of the grassy trail !!  And so back to the start of the country music song.

Wow

The next day on the road to the Romanian border I came across this signpost. It seemed like drastic measures to ensure that you stopped at the traffic light. 

I crossed into Romania using the bridge across the Danube at Vidin and then followed the river through a very fertile flood-plain the the capital Bucharest.

The city was known as the Paris of the east before the communist times and there are some magnificent buildings in the old town but these gives way to wide boulevards and ugly apartment blocks. Vast areas of the city were flattened on orders of the dictator Nicolae Ceausescu and characterless buildings like the 1000 room parliament building, that I will be visiting this afternoon, were erected.