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.

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.

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.

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.

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!