Day 77 - Bulgaria to Turkey via Greek Hospitality

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Before we left this morning we all plugged in our destination, Edirne, into our route app, MAPS.ME (M.M). Those that follow the blog know I've been having issues with M.M and it was doing it again this morning. Jeff was the only one who get get the App to route along the course we wanted into Greece, Tom led us off. We had to back track a little way to go over a bridge and swing down into Greece. At this stage M.M gave me a route that was much shorter than Tom had for the back track, so we followed that and duely ended up on barely discernible dirt and grass tracks for about 2kms. Eventually we hit the main road and the "short cut" had cost us about 15 minutes. Not happy, Again! What was good, though, was the main road had a nice wide shoulder on it and very little traffic. This road would take us all the way to the Turkish border.
We wanted to make the most of our sojourn into Greece so we picked a town off the side of the main road to get a drink and take a break. Tom led us to Spilaio, a small town where we found a little mini mart and what looked like a cafe, but was actually a small commercial kitchen. Avangelina did come and take our order though, and we got talking. Then the boss, Zoe, came over and the chat continued. We were brought our coffees with some complimentary bottles of water. Jeff went and had a longer chat and soon we were treated to some complementary plums in a sweet sugar/honey syrup similar to that used in baklava. So tasty! The ladies then invited us in to look at the kitchen. It was very manual with hand mixing going on in large bowls. They were making traditional dishes that they sell to various local towns as well as countries around the world. There was the syrupy plums, dried plum jerky, cheese pastries, peppers, jams and some things I didn't recognise at all. All of the raw ingredients were grown in the local area and the kitchen was operated by volunteers (Avangelina's day job was as the local nurse). We had a great time chatting and hearing about their kitchen and were even given some traditional cake before we left to top things off. We had spent a good hour in Spalio and had a great time, I guess we were something of a novelty to them and they were the best advertisement of Greek hospitality to us, I'd like to think that was a win/win.
We continued on our way back to the main road and coasted into a small town that abruptly turned into the border control point. No snotty border police here (like the exit from Serbia). They were happy and had a laugh with us and even asked for a link to the blog. Out of Greece and straight into Turkey and we had finally after 77 days we had reached our destination country (number 14). It was quite a surreal feeling. It was still about an 8km ride to our hotel in Edirne and the roads are not what you would call bicycle friendly, nor are the drivers. It was quite a nerve racking experience getting to our hotel but not as stressful as when I couldn't find my passport when checking in. I checked my bags, once, twice, three times and nope, couldn't find it. I was stressing about how I would go about getting a replacement passport and where I could have possibly lost it. I did one final check of my luggage and thankfully found my passport which had slipped down the back of my panier. Relief was never so palpable!

We went out for a walk and dinner and I was quite surprised by what did, and did not, see. There are all of the western brand names available here from both a product and food perspective including the likes of McDonalds and Starbucks. Big shopping malls that could quite easily be Highpoint of Northland once you were inside them, but also I did not see any woman wearing a burkha and only a small percentage wearing a hajib. Equally there were many girls wearing shorts and sleeveless tops, some even had tattoos, I guess I was expecting Turkey to be very conservative which it apparently, is not.
Distance travelled today: 63kms

Distance travelled so far: 4,249kms

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