Day 176: Asprovalta to Thessaloniki
/Big city time
After a nice breakfast we said goodbye to our hosts in Asprovalta and headed off up the coast. Our guest house mainly catered to German tourists and a large party of bloke were also at breakfast - a group called the Reisegruppe Heiterkeit, by my reckoning the “Hilarity Travel Group”, and they did seem to be having a lot of fun. The had a good line in matching t-shirts and shorts too, very smart.
The Pension Delfin, our very pleasant guest house in Asprovalta
We’d cycled about ten kilometres up the road when one of us realised they’d left their board shorts in the bathroom of the hotel. Oops. When you have so little luggage with you, losing one item of clothing is a major issue, so we turned round and headed back to Asprovalta.
We didn’t quite go all the way, leaving Tiger to do the last three kilometres whilst Sarina and I had a coffee and waited with his bags. All sorted, and caffeinated, we headed off again, albeit at 11am now.
A quick search for board shorts confirmed Tiger’s suspicion — they were back at the hotel
Today we were cycling along the shores of a lake for a lot of the journey, with beautiful landscapes either side of a quiet road once more. We saw four fellow cycle tourist today also, proving this is a popular route to get from the Adriatic coast to Turkey and the East.
Another lunch outside a village shop — this one had quite a limited selection of lunch options
Beautiful riding country
The black clouds threatened, but never actually turned to rain
Before we could ride into Thessaloniki, we had to cross a ridge of hills, which was quite a climb at the end of the day, but the gradients weren’t too bad, and then we could descend down into the city.
The waterfront in Thessaloniki and another Byzantine tower
We had an appointment with the Action Bike store, who are an Ortlieb pannier stockist and were able to help us out with a replacement for the hook we broke. They also had some other spares like puncture patches, chain lube and the first proper chamois cream we’ve had for about 5,000km. That’s going to be a nice luxury!
Supper with pretty nice sunset over the Aegean
