Day 50 - Bechet to Turnu Mǎgurele (48 miles)

I woke still needing to decide the way ahead with my sick bicycle. My original plan for Romania was to have alternate days camping and in accommodation but yesterday changed all that. I now need to find and get to a bicycle shop. There is supposed to be one in Corabia, a town 29 miles on, and another in Turnu Mǎgarele 19 miles after that. My first thought was to replace the broken rear spoke with one from the front, moving the problem to the least stressed wheel and improving my chances of making more distance by bike. I thought removing the brake disc might allow me to remove the spoke but the gears were in the way and I lacked the tool to remove them: end of that idea. I was also mindful that today is Sunday, that no shops are open, and there is little I can do that is constructive other than keep moving eastwards. I could do this by taxi or I could cycle and just get a taxi if it all went wrong. Given that the bike held together yesterday, I was willing to push my luck a little further.

Wells were still used until quite recently throughout Romania

Because of my unproductive workshop efforts first thing, it was past 10am by the time I got on the road. I cycled steadily and relatively slowly through a similar landscape to the last couple of days, willing my bike on and praying to any God who might listen. As with yesterday I slipped into counting down the kilometres with the road markers. And as with yesterday the wind blew. 

Normally, if the wind does blow, it gets going in the afternoon and picks up as the day progresses. Today it had kicked off early and eventually became every bit as frustrating as yesterday, blowing down the long stretches of open road that I faced throughout the day. At times I felt I was looking at a never ending straight road heading away from me and tackling a never ending wind coming towards me, definitely a combination designed to mess with the mind. At Corabia I stopped to take stock and to look at the remains of a Roman fort built over a century after Trajan's successful invasion of what is now Romania, in part because it was just off the route and it gave me a flavour of local history, but also because it gave me a rest from the wind and I didn’t want the day to be solely me versus the elements.

The never ending road

With everything seeming to hold up I decided to press on with the next 19 miles to Turnu Mǎgarele, a little further east and a slightly larger town with maybe the potential for a better bike shop. It took another two and half hours of steady cycling to get there, taking me past the wide, sandy beaches of the river Olt which runs into the Danube nearby, parked up lorry-mounted bee hives (they drive them around here to pollinate local crops) and a few derelict, industrial looking buildings, something that seems quite common in the countryside here in Romania. The city is not that large, its streets radiate off a small park and the centre is clean, quiet and shaded by trees; it has a nice feel about it, very different to other places I have passed through in this country.

Beehives

River Olt

My accommodation is a small and well appointed apartment on the ninth floor of a rather brutalistic Soviet housing block, surrounded by similar blocks. Everything outside the apartment seems worn and dated; the small, old fashioned lift had those internal, wardrobe type doors and you needed to put pressure on them to keep them closed or the lift stopped between floors; the lights dimmed as the elevator started moving; the floor numbers were written in marker pen by the buttons; and a section of the lift floor felt strangely loose and had me imagining a long plummet down the lift shaft. As I walked down the dark and sterile corridor to the flat I also noticed a tiny balcony at the end with a flimsy looking barrier and a chunk of concrete missing from the floor. Between lift and balcony I could not stop my mind drifting to thoughts of schools in Britain with crumbling RAC concrete and of wondering when the integrity of this building was last checked.

Tomorrow I visit the bicycle repair shop.

City Park