Back on the last moments of Day 2, I checked whether there were any trains leaving Ruse in a southernly direction - I remembered the busy road full of lorries. There were actually quite a few, some very early, but put off the decision as to what I would do, I made it dependent of when I would wake up.

It was quite early, at 5:30 am, that I opened my eyes and realized there was a train leaving in just twenty-five minutes, at 5:55. Let´s see if I would reach it. At the speed of light (well, almost), I packed my stuff, washed a bit, carried my bike down the stairs, but managed to lock myself outside the entrance, when the door shut behind me, my bike being outside, but the bags still very much inside. I did not want to wake up the owners, but saw that my neighbors were awake, tried to throw pebbles at their window - no luck. I ended up ringing the bell - and to my surprise, the door got unlocked - I could have done that earlier. So now it was a dash for the station, which I reached at 5:54. However, there was no sign of this train, some waiting passengers looked rather amused at me dashing back and forth in the tunnel below the tracks. An older person who spoke a bit of German explained the first train was yet to leave, that in about twenty minutes. I thought of starting the bike ride right then, but decided I would just buy a ticket somewhere south of me (I had no idea where the station I had bought the ticket actually was), To my surprise, bike carriage was possible, I even had a legal bicycle ticket.

In Bulgaria, disabled person cannot ride trains, at least not at this station, there were multiple flight of stairs, it was quite a challenge to haul my bike up these, but eventually made it. The train, which was indeed bound for Sofia, but I did not want to travel all the way there, just wished to get out of the vicinity of the border area.

So this was Train Ride #5, an older, but clean and well-kept formerly Austrian (ÖBB) carriage, probably from the end of the Eighties. There was even soap in the bathroom. It was rather empty. It stopped at many tiny stations and I decided to get off after about 50 kilometers south of Rise, at a small station called Bjala.

Here I checked Google Maps and I found out that I was now "only" 1,800 kilometers away from Batumi, with exactly 18 biking days to reach Georgia by the evening of October 28, meaning I would have to produce an average of 100 kilometers per day, a doable task, however, one has to cater for unexpected events. I had discussed with Ella that in case my ride would be too slow, I could still catch some sort of public transport.

So, at around 7:30, the "real" biking portion of the trip began, as the famous China proverb says, every big journey beging with the first step, in my case, the first kilometer.

This first kilometer and even the first dozen kilometers were spent riding on a relatively major road, luckily with light traffic, but it would not have been a lot of fun dodging trucks the entire day. Luckily, after reaching the town of Polski Trambesh, I found a lot more quiet, less busy road, veering up a hillside. A jogger was running in my direction, I asked if he spoke English, he did, but it turned out his German was even better, him having lived in Germany for several years. He was an engineer, who decided to return to his native country to lead a life in the quiet countryside - and told me the road would have quite an incline, for that, it would have next to no traffic. He was correct. The weather was quite nice, around 25 degrees, with initially quite a few clouds which later gave way to almost uninterrupted sunshine. It was a pleasant day for a ride, a bit like being in Wienerwald, the forests around Vienna.

Turning their backs on me...

In the town of Zlataritsa, I went to a bank to exchange €100 to the local currency, this turned out to be pretty much an ordeal, with all three lady employees of the small bank office trying to figure out how to do this, guess I was the first one ever to make this transaction there. After about 45 minutes, I had roughly 200 Bulgarian Lev and bought some supplies and had a rest in the town.

Later, I rode through a small settlement, where I saw a house with a large number of beehives.

Lots of bees...

It was so that I reached a town with the pretty name of Elena. Not just the name was pretty, so was town, too - with a number of old houses with stone basements and wooden upper floors. I visited a nice orthodox church there, which was actually closed, but the care-taker opened it for me for a few Levs.

I was not too tired, so thought of continuing, however, it being fall, by 6 pm, it had gotten rather dark - and the next hotel was dozens of kilometers away. I thought the best course of action was to find a place to stay, which I did, at a nice house with Bulgarian folklore setting and after cleaning up, went to bed.

Together with my detour, I rode about 112 kilometers with about 900 meters of altitude gain that day, here is the map.