2/6/2011 49km dep. 8:30 arr. 2:30.
I think I like camping in the forest. You are close to nature, the water is clean enough to drink probably, you don’t have to have showers, you get to dig a hole to poo into…
Wild strawberry flower
We pushed our bikes up out of our little camp spot in the field of flowers and continued on our way to Velenje, yesterday’s intended destination, still more than 20km away.
Going around the hairpins
The terrain was similar to yesterday’s, hilly of course. Though our road more or less followed the contour at 900-1000m, sometimes, usually around rivers there were some nasty little steep hills.
Hills and Clouds
It is a mix of forest and farms in this area Pohorje. We saw the cows had been milked and there were some steel cans of milk waiting to be picked up. This land is amazingly postcard beautiful and so sparsely populated.
The road started coming down off the hill and we shed the altitude we worked so hard for yesterday. We soon got to the town on the main road and decided to have a coffee and hot chocolate at the guest house in Gorny Dolic (600m).
Hot chocolate
From this point it was all downhill until Velenje (300m) through a beautiful gorge. It was a hair raising ride, or would have been if we weren’t wearing helmets. Apart from the breathtaking scenery flying past, we were also on a major road. So it’s a little difficult to concentrate on the river, cliffs and caves, etc, when there is a truck behind you waiting for the next straight, and a queue of cars waiting behind the truck, etc, etc.
Tower ruin in Velenje
We had did some food shopping in Velenje, ate some of it underneath a stone tower ruin. While we were looking for tourist information office which we never found, we passed by the official opening of a petrol station on the main road. The opening was complete with red carpet, a brass band, the press, speeches, applause. I was quite dumbfounded by that actually.
Petrol station opening ceremony
Anyway, according to the law of what goes down must come up, we unfortunately had to climb approximately one more hill to get to our destination.
But we got over it an came out on the flats of the Savinja river. We saw lots of hops growing, which are a speciality of this region. But for some reason there aren’t a wide variety of Slovenian beers on sale, though they very certainly drink beer here.
Hops!
We arrived in Prebold with a choice of 3 camp sites. Our first choice was OK sort of but its reception was closed, so we went to the second choice and found an amazingly nice little camp ground in town. We are camped on the lawn under some type of fruit tree. There are 2 other guests here. They have a little bar in a stone and wood barn-like building. Inside there are hanging all kinds of old tools and farm implements. There are also old photos of women planting and harvesting hops, and there are some hops hanging from a line to dry. It’s like a little hops museum. Very happy.