We left Zagreb at 7.30am to ride to the Slovenian border town of Somobor. I spent a great deal of time working with google maps writing down left and right turns, the name of streets and just about anything that would lead us out of the city. Well, even good plans go to crap sometimes. After battling tram tracks, cars and motorcycle we decided to just follow the sign to the the capital of Slovenia and the border crossing. The problem with this was that the road took us onto the A1 which is a motorway and one is not allowed to ride their bicycles on a motorway. We thought that we should just try and chance riding to the border on the motorway and see what happens. We did see a highway patrol bike on the other side of the road waving at us to say hello, or get the hell of the motorway you idiots. We just waved at him and kept riding to the border.
About 5 minutes later a motorway works vehicle stopped and told us he had calls from drivers and that we had to get off the motorway. The next thing that zoomed up to us was that nice highway patrol officer who was waving to us about 10 minutes earlier. We had a nice chat, spoke about prosecuting and the criminal justice system whilst sitting on our bikes on the motorway. We discussed his job, his family and he shook our hands and told us to get off the motorway and don't do it again. No problem, we turned around and rode back about 100 metres and found the town of Somobor. We rolled through the town and found this little border crossing which was going to be another problem in our day.
What we didn't realise was that at this border crossing, it only applies to EU residents. Now we were in bit of bother. We had left Croatia and now were trying to enter Slovenia on a border crossing that didn't apply to 2 dumb Aussie cyclists. We told the police we couldn't go back because got kicked off the motorway, so we had nowhere to ride. After a bit of negotiating, one of the officers took our passports to another border crossing and got us a stamp each in our passports. We were allowed to enter Slovenia.
Slovenia is one beautiful country. We rode the back roads all day reaching our final destination at 5pm. Dolenjske Toplice is situated on a river and this is where we're camping tonight. The campsite is excellent and I'll post all my photos tomorrow, the WiFi is not strong enough to upload all the photos.
Whilst riding along the road 2 touring cyclists from Slovenia caught us on the major climb of the day. We chatted about touring and they provided advice to us on where to camp. They also wrote down all the towns we will go through to reach the Italian border in a couple of days time.
We walked into town and had a great meal at this nice restaurant called 'Ostarija'. It was time to head back to camp and check out whether the copper pipe I bought today has held my shitty tent together. We did get to see a 'Harvey Norman' shop as we left Zagreb today. Photos coming tomorrow.
We ended up doing another 100kms and we intend to do the same tomorrow.
Until tomorrow, safe riding.
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