Out of bed, coffee, packed and off we headed motivated by the stomach for some food. It was cool and brisk, and we had our warm weather gear on as the forecast was not very high.

Descending down through villages..

Beautiful valleys and rivers.

The cycle path following an old rail line, including three tunnels in this section.

Looking back up into the clouds from the direction we had started.

The river must flood at times.

All was going well until here, then as I followed Tony an explosion of ‘stuff’ blasted out his rear wheel. He had a puncture, and as he has tubeless tyres that ‘stuff’ was sealant.

It was a reasonable gash and he was able to plug it with two plugs, pump it up, and the sealant did its job. Whilst he repaired, I cleaned.

We only went a few hundred metres and came to this…a river crossing. Unfortunately it was about 30-45 cm deep and decided we were not prepared to get that wet, just yet….so we detoured back, up and around onto the main road for a few km before rejoining the path.

We stopped for coffee in Tolmezzo then headed off on a quieter route out of town. We came to this impenetrable road block. Mountains to the left, river to the right, not a lot of options.

We rode back towards Tolmezzo and cut down to join the highway to cross the river to the other side.

The highway was good as it had a decent verge and we crossed the river and continued on our way back to the quieter route.

The quieter path ran out and for three km we were back in a major arterial road near the freeway. It started to pour. By now we were in lighter weight clothes as we were hot…now we were cold again…

There were many people stopped under the freeway crossover sheltering, including this nice young lad who from the Netherlands. He currently is studying in Austria and had ridden to Sappada the previous day to watch the Giro, and he was riding home.

He told us the bike path we were about to join was fairly new and he was super impressed with it and thought it better than anything in the cycle friendly Netherlands.

He was right. We had about 50 km, mainly in the rain, of this wonderful pathway, freshly sealed, involving maybe 20 tunnels, the longest of which was 950 metres in length.

At most tunnels cyclists were sheltering at either end waiting for the rain to ease before heading off again.

The mountains and rivers were great viewing.

Then there are the locals who do things like this to make you smile.

At an old railway station, Chiusaforte, is this amazing place. It is a cafe/ restaurant with an area for purchasing maps, cycling spares, souvenirs, maintenance area. Many cyclists had stopped as did we as the rain had eased.

But the rain came back and here we are in one of the tunnels.

As we got closer to Slovenia, the dramatic mountains increased.

I really liked these old huts.

Tony took a fancy to this sign,

7 km from our destination we arrived at the Slovenian border.

Slovenia – a country that we rode through back in 2019 from Maribor to Ljubljana to Trieste. This time we are in the Alps region, to the north west of the country, dominated by the Triglav National Park.

The history is rich and deep with evidence back to the Bronze and Iron Age. The Romans arrived in the 1st century AD.

We were just km from the Austrian border and it was tempting to climb another hill, but we are fortunate in that we have ridden in Austria on previous trips and we were keener to get to Kranjska Gora, our overnight destination.

Finally we had some downhill after climbing gradually for over 50 km.

Kranjska Gora is in the Sava Dolinka Valley and the northern gateway to the Soca Valley, where we will be in a few days time.

The town was a key supply base for the Soca Front during World War I but today is Slovenia’s premier winter sports playground with world championship level skiing events to hiking in Triglav.

The Church of the Assumption in the town’s main square dates from around the 14th century. The Romanesque bell tower is original, but most of the rest has been updated over the years.

Another great hotel, with our bikes stored in the very secure ski room. We cleaned up and headed out for dinner, finding a lovely restaurant a few hundred metres away. No room inside so we sat outside, which was not too bad as we had our warm jackets on and it was fairly mild. It stopped raining at the border!

We were entertained by a very noisy, celebrating group who were singing in another language and then started tossing their freshly poured wine over each other. Super weird.

I asked our waiter and he laughed and said ‘oh, they are Polish’!

This dog we watched too. It came with a family group but was tethered so it could have no family interaction. The noises it made were similar to our Khaleesi so we did watch it.

It was wanting to participate, have some pats, but instead the female owner wacked it around the head, pushed its head into the ground whilst we were gasping and saying no! Some people do not deserve dogs!

Back to our room, what a view!

It was a longer touring day today at 118 km, 902m climbing. An interesting climbing graph shows how long we climbed for.

Thanks for reading 😊❣️