Our first three days cycling in Romania were spent mainly on
fairly large roads, one step below major highways. The buildings and towns on
these roads are generally in poor condition. Today’s ride (Friday 9/12) was
mainly on smaller roads through the countryside, and we were struck by the
primitive conditions around us. The conditions were far worse than what we saw
two years ago biking through a number of other ex-Communist countries – Poland,
Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia.
Stray dogs were everywhere. While most of them were quite
small and ignored us, the few that showed interest in us caused a problem for
dog-fearing (and–hating) Peter. At one point, when a dog of questionable intent
stepped onto the road, Peter braked and, unable to get his bike shoes out of
their clips, fell to the ground and scraped his left knee (matching a scraped
right knee from a few days ago). After that, Carol “rode shotgun”, riding in
front watching for dogs, making sure to place herself between dogs and Peter at
all times.
Besides dogs, there were horses, chickens, turkeys, geese,
and ducks on or right beside the road. We also saw quite a few horse-drawn
vehicles and a couple of human-pulled carts. Workers in the fields used
old-fashioned hand-held tools such as scythes and picked corn by hand. The
houses beside the road were in dreadful shape, and the roads themselves were
very rutted and full of potholes. We hit one 2.5 mile stretch of unexpected
dirt road, something that our skinny tires don’t deal with very well.
All in all, it was a challenging and eye-opening day.
Scenes from our ride today:
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