Figure 8 On A Bike

After our string of city days we were looking forward to our time in Sinaia where we had a very nice apartment booked. Sinaia is a small town in Romania's Bucegi Mountains. To get there we experienced our first Romanian train. We had been warned that Romanian trains were old and slow and not up to European standards. To us Americans they were marvels of public transit, though we could see the complaint that much of the infrastructure in the country dated to the communist era and was in sore need of investment. There were no indicators of which stop we were at so we had to use Ben's phone GPS to anticipate which stop we needed to get off at. The station was small and cute and we managed to order a taxi to take us the short distance to our place up the hill. It was raining, which was depressing as we wanted snow. We took the day to run grocery errands and the following day we spent relaxing in the apartment and planning future parts of the trip. Rainy Sinaia

We left Dr. Aslan's nice hotel and flew to Erzurum Türkiye. We were unsure about the place we had booked here as it had zero reviews and two different addresses on Booking.com. We messaged to ask what to tell the taxi driver and she called and talked to the driver to get us where we needed to go. This place was BIG. It had an extra bedroom and a living room. We moved our stuff in and quickly had to get to the grocery store as this place was lacking in some basics like toilet paper - which I can forgive in a culture that doesn't use it...but there also wasn't any hand soap...We were looking at staying at this place for about 3 weeks so it wasn't a huge deal to pick up some stuff as we probably would have run out during the stay anyway. The place needed a handyman though and there were a lot of small things that were NOT great for a long stay. Oh well, live and learn. It was above a grocery store and that was awesome! After so many weeks of having limited access ...

London Views London Bridge We woke up on the ferry to Liverpool, well technically Birkenhead . Groggy, but stubbornly, we did not give into the on board coffee not wanting to give them any more of our money. At the "NOT border" border control office we had to reassemble our bikes. The officer conducting document checks (they never bothered checking ours) told us we should rethink our plans and hop on a train as everything was flooded. I asked him for an online resource we could use to check on closed roads, "we don't have anything like that, but if you get into trouble just hop on a train". "Sure thing boss". We rode away with mild concern over our future.

Some nice young bros at Ballater Hostel had made us a little insecure about our priorities, asking us "Do you only do sports? Or do you ever see any castles, or do anything cultural?", so we decided it'd be worth it to spend a few days checking out the cities of Edinburgh and Glasgow. Our timetable didn't allow us to bike all the way from Ballater to Edinburgh (nor did our fatigue), so first it was back to Aberdeen and then onto a train bound south. Applying our hard-won real-world knowledge, we decided NOT to take the entire Deeside Way back to Aberdeen , sticking to the paved roads for the parts of the bike trail that we knew would be particularly rough and hilly. However, because it's simply not allowed for us to go too long without seeing a bike mechanic, Susan's fork broke AGAIN. The same front rack that had so many problems broke another bolt - but the top one this time! At first it seemed like maybe it was better that the other bolt broke... until we...