Heavy Fucking Thunder

Zagreb-Novi Sad
18.07-28.07

hellouu everybody!

sorry you didn’t hear from us in a while, we were busy staying alive and dry and in good spirits. also, our phones kept telling us we’re in bosnia and charging away all our data.

so, from zagreb to novi sad our route was under… mixed weather.
heavy fucking thunder (TM) made us search shelter almost every day. which also made us come into contact with more locals, so that was nice!(especially since so many people were so super welcoming and friendly to us, offering us places to stay, ice cold water, fruit or coffee and creative conversations climbing around language barriers)

on the day we left zagreb we found an amazing campspot on the sava river bank. that night the first storm hit. not the worst one but still our tents bent and curved and swelled in the wind. most of us got wet that night but no one flew away at least (phew).

on the next day, during the afternoon, the big storm hit. like BIG big. like it was in the news in many countries outside of croatia big. it also felt like something you’d see on the news. luckily, we all found shelter somewhere, most of us together in a café. two of us were apart from the group. as soon as we sat down the chairs were blown away and our glasses shattered to the floor. the others, in a different place two towns further watched their bikes fall down like dominos.
and those clouds! big, dark, dangerous, low hanging clouds that rolled in with a speed we’d never seen before. fast, like they were going to stomp you down, smash you, ground you into tiny pieces. okay, we’re being dramatic. but it was dramatic!
the following days we kept cycling past the damage the storm had caused. ripped power lines, all tangled up in broken fences and roofs. tiling and branches scattered everywhere, trees uproated, big branches blocking the bicycle lanes. everyone out in the streets cleaning up and turning the damage into fire wood..

we found many different kinds of shelter and many different kinds of kindness. we slept under a roof next to an old church, in the backyard of a firefighters station (where we were led by a friendly yet abrupt fire fighter), and twice next to football fields which we recommend cause there’s usually running water, roofed areas and sometimes people will let you shower and use the bathroom there. one of them we wouldn’t recommend as strongly though, since we were being kept awake by overly excited teenagers for a long time and some of us had to endure sexist comments and an uncomfortable atmosphere.

with cooking we had to be creative sometimes and one day or the other dinnner was skipped when it simply wasn’t possible to cook and everyone waited out the storm in their tents and hammocks. we had an amazing pasta-turned-soup though that was cooked under a tarp that we had to hold down with four people when the rain was POURING down on us. in just a few minutes our 12L pot was more than half full with rain water and every tupper got a free washing that night.

now the storms are mostly over (?) according to the ever-changing weather forecast. so it looks like, instead of heat-storm-heat-storm-heat we will now have a more consistent weather of heat-heat-heat-heat-heat.
let’s see when we’ll start missing bad weather.

apart from all this (did we just write a whole blogpost about the weather?) we also ate amazing figs, peaches, plums and pears, dumpstered cucumbers without end (cucumber salad every day), cycled along agriculture (mostly corn, soy and sunflower fields), small towns and – sadly – along a big road for several days. in some places you could still see the marks from the not-so-long-ago wars that scarred the area. like bulletholes in the road signs and house facades or destroyed buildings next to fancy new houses. but luckily we never found any of the landmines some of us had worried about that are still a danger in some areas of croatia (and serbia) when wildcamping.

our bikes and bodies did mostly fine, no major accidents or health crisis. one of us had a hard day though when they were pulling crocodile (the tools and equipment trailer) and had four malfunctions during the first hilly 20 kilometers.

if you noticed that the blogpost from ljubljana to zagreb is missing – hold on a bit longer. it’ll come. we’re chaotic. but we promise it’ll be worth the wait. ;)

see you at the next free WiFi spot!
the BikeDinos