Like all great ideas, this one started as some kind of joke. A few months ago Željko, a great friend I know for almost 18 years, said something like: “Let’s go to the coast on our bikes!”. “Sure, why not. It will be fun” was the usual answer until a week ago we came back to this topic. We decided to go to Crikvenica. The distance was just a bit over 170 km and if we make some good progress on the first half of the way we could be there in less then 10 hours.
I can’t remember being so completely wrong ever in my entire life
We knew that when we reach Gorski kotar it will be just uphill, uphill, uphill but no one of us knew that we would feel like mountaineers on some parts during the “bike ride”.
The initial plan was to start on Friday after work and make as much progress as possible until nightfall and do the rest next day. This plan was like made in heaven for Mladen, another great friend whom I know since I was a kid (if not even longer :)), who was hoping to squeeze in a few extra breaks along the way. But soon after the journey started Željko a.k.a Kuba (pronounced like the country or the handsome actor, what a coincidence :)) and I silently agreed to go all the way in one go. We knew Mladen a.k.a Čo (pronounced Cho like the beginning of Chocolate, a coincidence again :)) wouldn’t really like the idea so we would break the news somewhere along the way :D
And off we went! Bags and bikes packed with things “we will need” and spirits high as the Mt. Everest we made a short stop 3 km into the ride at Andrea’s, my girlfrie…fiancee(boy am I growing up:)), house. She wished us a nice trip and from there it was all about getting to the sea. We picked up good speed on the first 45 km till Karlovac where we agreed to have a quick break to buy some water and have a bite or two. I don’t remember how long it took us exactly to reach Karlovac but we guessed that at 2 am we should reach Crikvenica. We would lose some time uphill but could make up for it on the way down and keep a nice “race-pace” of some 20km/h. As I mentioned before, we have been so wrong that it’s almost embarrassing to write about it.
We have been recalculating our time ever so often and the only conclusion was to add some more hours to our arrival time.
After Karlovac everything was going pretty much only up. It wasn’t really a problem because the incline was usually mild and there were some declines along the way which made everything still a fun ride. We passed Dubravci and Jarče Polje and arrived at Vukova Gorica which translated means something like “Wolf’s Hill”. We were joking around about what would happen if we encounter a wolf or, even better, a bear and we all were still laughing a lot.
Something around that time night began to fall and we knew that things might change a bit now because of poor visibility. We put on our reflective shirts, turned on the lights and moved on. Čo equipped his bike with a total of 4 (yes, FOUR) headlights which was driving me nuts because every time I looked back to see where they were I saw this lights coming towards me. This tricked me into believing a car/truck is closing on us and I was always trying to move to the side to avoid being hit by it. After some times I got used to it but at the beginning it was all a bit unpleasant.
Next we arrived at Bosanci (a village with 44 people and 16 households). Here is where the real fun begins (sort of). It was now really dark and riding became very boring. You can’t enjoy the landscape, you don’t see pretty much anything and nothing is really going on. “Oh is that so?”, might be what nature was thinking on this statement. We were riding towards Ravna Gora, or “Flat Hill” in Croatian, while still having to pass Vrbovsko and there were two things I really didn’t like there. First, flat hill my ass, it wasn’t really hard to ride uphill for several kilometers but I was hoping for some more active recovery while riding the “flat land”. Second, and more scary, were the noises we could hear from the woods. When you ride through the night (or travel through the night in general) you tend to pick up more sounds than it is actually good for you. We could hear branches crack, some rustling and many other things that made us ride much faster then we wanted :D
One of the funniest moments so far was going uphill towards Vrbovsko in a low gear (you have to pedal a lot to move forward, but it’s easier when you need to go up). We were all just trying to get to the summit when all of a sudden we heard some noise pretty close to us. Like sprinters propel themself on the start of a race at the bang we pretty much exploded on that sound. We tried to get out of the danger zone as fast as possible but unfortunately we were still in low gear so that the overall picture looked more like from a cartoon where the characters picks up speed by pedaling fast on the spot and then shooting off fast as thunder. The only difference was that we were riding something around 8 km/h which is slower then a regular jog
Racing at a “ridiculous” speed we arrived in Vrbovsko after first missing the exit (it turned out that this way was longer but easier in terms of altitude changes). We were quite happy to go downhill for a few minutes. We made our last real break and continued our ride which from now on will be just the already mentioned uphill, uphill, uphill.
It was something around 10 km of pure uphill “ride”. After riding for more then 6-7 hours and a day at work (with two bike rides to the office and back home of 10 km in each direction) it started to drag on us. Most of all on Čo who, I have to mention here did an awesome job!, had his tank pretty much empty. We were pushing his bike up so that he could recover a bit more and even pushed him while we were riding up (one for all and all for one :)). We pretty much didn’t have any other options except stopping somewhere and sleeping for a few hours. But because of all the “background noise” this wasn’t a good solution so we just kept pushing.
Then came the mentioned Ravna Gora and from there we knew we just have to reach Delnice and then it should be downhill all the way (at least this was what Kuba said). And we have been wrong again!!! It was downhill for a while and I was freezing because the outside temperature has been something around 5°C which can become very cold if combined with the wind. We took a wrong turn but got lucky as I checked our progress on the phone and realized that the dot which was representing our position wasn’t following the generated route.
We rode back a bit only to realize a 17% incline which we could only cover on foot pushing our bikes. Then it was a nice ride to Fužine which turned out to be a really nice village along with Vrata (Croatian for “Door”) a little before it. The houses are small a really nice looking. I really hope to be able to go there again some time and enjoy everything a bit more. All the way from Delnice (which was still more then 40 km away) we were listening to Kuba who could “smell the sea”. He should really try to make some money with this extraordinary sense of smell
Now Crikvenica was really in sight. We passed Fužine and went on and finally saw the Adriatic Sea!
Now it was really only going downhill! But as everything has a flip side we missed a turn (again!!!) and ended up 10km from where we would have landed if everything went as planed. But this wasn’t going to stop us now from reaching the ultimate goal
We drove along the road and had to battle a lot of strong side winds while trying to avoid the traffic which was quite dense for this time of the day. We passed Križišće, Jadranovo and Dramalj and arrived at Crikvenica.
We made a small stop at a store to buy something to eat and headed straight to the beach. We were really surprised by what we saw there. A blue fence stretching something like 400 meters. If you want to enter you have to fork over 15 kuna per person (2€, 2.5$). I mean what the bloody fuck is this bullshit?!? As far as I can see you have the same easy chairs and sunshades and the beach is also identical. The only difference is that you have cafes 20 meters from the beach while we had to cross a street and walk 50 meters to get the same things.
This was the biggest disappointment of the whole ride. I don’t really see a reason to pay for something I won’t gain any extra value and I guess other people thought the same way because the beach looked pretty deserted.
Finally we came to a nice patch and set up our “base camp”
After a 13 hours of biking I just needed to take a break and try to have a few hours of sleep. I wasn’t really tired but I just felt like my body needs sleep (in that last 24 hours I have spent 15.5 hours on the bike). The fun part here was that the wind was blowing a bit and I was just fed up with freezing so I decided to hop into my sleeping bag and take a nap. Čo and Kuba laughed as probably the rest of the beach but sometimes you just don’t give a shit
I woke up some time later and we were ready for something to eat. The guys went to the store and bought some beer, juice, bread, and other things. I made myself a sandwich and enjoyed our accomplishment. For the next few hours I went from being awake to sleeping in some 20 minute intervals and somewhere at 11 in the morning I went for a swim. The sea was cold but after a minute or two you are just to numb to care :)
We all were happy because of what we have managed to pull off but were also afraid of the way back. The return was initially planed for 10 in the morning as we were hoping to make the distance in 10 to 11 hours which would be just enough to make it before nightfall. We agreed that it would be better to start earlier, something like 8 in the morning but it turned out we were leaving at dawn.
Being on the beach was nice. Kuba felt like being in heaven while surrounded by some cute girls. He picked one girl in particular and couldn’t get his eyes of her. But our lover-boy wasn’t in the mood to make a move :p. Everything the girl did, from laying on her towel to swimming in the sea was specifically designed to teas him, or at least that’s what he wants us to believe
Night fell and it was time to prepare ourselves for sleep. Čo had this awesome idea that we should put the beer cans around our bikes so that everyone who tries to come near them will “raise an alarm”. I don’t have to mention how wrong he was :D. He pushed a few of them away himself while sleeping which woke us up, a few simply fell because of the wind which was blowing (I have to say that my sleeping bag kept me warm all night long).
Kuba had to respond to a few calls of nature during the night and Čo was pulling the bag like you would pull a blanket over yourself but you really can’t because you are pulling something from underneath of you (in the end he managed to turn his bag upside down so that in the morning his face was covered with the bart of the bag you rest your head on :)). All in all it was a nice night topped up with a beautiful view.
I had a very decent sleep and was awake just at dawn again and realized that pretty close to us some guys were going back home from a night out and wanted to refresh themselves by taking a quick swim. At that point it got a bit loud so that sleeping was not really possible but I felt fresh and relaxed so no more sleep was in fact needed.
We had small breakfast as we ate everything left over from the day before and started packing everything up in our backpacks and bikes. Čo again was the most innovative here by using duct tape (something like that) to mount things on his bike :) We got ready for the return trip which we hoped wouldn’t be longer then the trip to Crikvenica. do I have to mention that we were wrong again :D? We posed for a picture and started our way back…
I put in the start and ending points of our ride into my phone to get the shortest path back and we were surprised by the fact that it had now chosen a different one (I guess because of our position in Crikvenica which is different then the generic point we had directions to). This was a huge relief because the incline would be so steep on a certain part that we would have to push our bikes for more then 7 km which would cost us a lot of time.
So we started riding and really liked the new route. It wasn’t really hard to climb up the mountain but it was a bit frightening to see the huge rock wall which was saying something like “Let’s see what you got!”
And we didn’t really want to go another way because the only alternative was even more pain :). So we started climbing and climbing and we made really good progress as you can see on the picture below (Kuba was in front and Čo a bit behind :))
It was all smiles until we saw this sign.
This sign is warning people of a more dangerous part of the road. If you were driving in a car it would have got a little tricky but on our bikes it was no problem at all. We had enough space to drive safely up with not much of a problem. We arrived at a nice viewpoint at something around 600 meters height where we had a small rest and continued on.
On the picture above you can see just above my right shoulder how Čo carefully taped his sleeping bag to his bike. There were other things taped as well so that he looked more like a dump collector but who cares :D. From this viewpoint we had an awesome view on the sea, the islands of Krk and Cres as well as other parts of the northern coast. Another picture you can see below isn’t really special but it just seemed to me like a cool thing to see a mountain through a roof :)
Now it was time to move on and just as we progressed in a steady pace Kuba’s back tire said bye bye.
The part that made him a bit mad was that this exact tire was put on his bike the day before we went on the trip so in essence it survived only 2 days :(. The open road was substituted by a deep forest with a gravel road but all in all everything was looking good. We saw a nice cottage in the middle of the forest and I couldn’t stop thinking how awesome it would be to call this my own :)
Going up and down this path I phoned a friend (Petar, a.k.a Bamboocha, from the Fanta commercial) who was on a bike ride the same weekend . He was in Ogulin that weekend and more then ready to join us on our way back. It’s always better to ride with some friends then alone (except if you want to pick up some speed:)).
We agreed to let him know when we leave Delnice so that we could arrive at the same time in Vrbovsko. He got there a little quicker then we did and we were introduced to his cousin Ivan (I don’t know anything about a nickname in this case :)) who was just tagging along for fun and would leave us at Bosanci and head back home (this would be a 80 km or so ride for him).
After we got together we took some time for a real lunch. I just needed some real meat in my system so the decision wasn't really hard :)
After filling our stomachs with some nice food we were ready for the last part (still 100 km to go at least). And here was the place where my problems began. I started having pain in my knees (both the good right and the bad left one) and I really had problems with keeping a steady pace but I didn’t really have any options. I was lucky that most of the way now was downhill and we picked up speed really good which meant that we covered ground quicker then before.
Petar on his road bike was light-years ahead of us with our XC bikes (and tires!!!) but I still managed to drive faster then the speed limit on some parts (which I don’t think I have to mention was AWESOME). Everything looked a bit new to us because most of this part has been covered during the night a day ago so it was hard to find any reference points along the way. We made some stops here and there and I was always hoping for some more downhill because my knees were getting worse by every meter.
Then came a turning point at around 60 km to go. We were riding a mild uphill and I was riding up front in a low gear while trying to keep the pressure on my knees minimal when Petar started joking about our speed. He got of the bike and kept running next to me. Oh man did that piss me off! “I would rather have my legs fall off than someone making fun of me!!!” was my response just before I kicked into higher gear and started speeding like a mad man. From that point on I ignored the pain completely and was able to drive really fast.
Sometimes you need a reminder to realize how much you can push yourself :) Thanks for that!!!
We arrived at Jastrebarsko which meant it was time to say goodbye to Petar and finish the last 35 km. I really didn’t want to ride another time during dusk/night because the traffic was getting denser as we were coming closer to Zagreb so I started pedaling a bit faster and kept the speed at around 25 km/h and to my surprise Čo and Kuba kept the same speed :)
It took us some more time to get to Zagreb but with every meter passed I was getting stronger and stronger. Maybe it has something to do with the adrenaline going through your body because you know the end is near (not in an apocalyptic way :)). Something around 9.30 PM we arrived at Andrea’s house again where she had some cake ready for us. Kuba liked the cake really much because he ate 4 or 5 pieces (who is counting anyway :)).
We continued the last few kilometers to our homes and were happy about what we have managed to pull off.
Later that day I went with Andrea to a fireworks festival where we enjoyed a nice show. We even let a lantern fly after the show.
If it’s true that you can make a wish then she will join us next time on our ride into the unknown (this sounds so cool :)). I am really happy that we managed to get there and back without any injuries or other complications except for sore muscles and some knee pain which will go away soon :)
The only question unanswered is: “Would I do the same thing again?”.
NO!!! Say whaaaaaat!?!? I wouldn’t do it like that again. There are a few things I would change in order to make this a better experience:
Get better tires – I was using XC tires which made it hard to ride on the road (which was 90% of the way). Next time I will get myself some road tires so that hopefully it will be a bit easier.
- Plan the route better - I just typed in Crikvenica into the navigation and we went for the shortest way. It might be possible to make a longer ride but with less difference in altitude
- Prepare my joints better – use some medication or do specific exercises or wear special footwear.
- Pack less stuff - I had an extra shirt and pants as well as spare tires ready just in case but it turned out to be just unnecessary weight
- Invest in some saddlebags - Carrying everything on your shoulders for so long really takes it’s toll. Pain in my back and shoulders were a consequence of that
Maybe there are more things I would change but I can’t remember at the moment. One thing I know I wouldn’t change are the guys I made the ride with. Traveling with people you know for so many years is something you will remember for a long time.
