Day 76: Resk to Prirzen Kosovo

May 2, 2023

When hard days make other days easy

“Just like Thanksgiving dinner,” Rachel says and continues, “weeks to prepare the meal, and it’s done in 5 minutes after sitting down at the table.” She is referring to what took us most of the day yesterday to get to the top of the mountain and today under a half hour we are down on the other side. Well, when there are two hard days, the third day must seem easier.

We arranged for breakfast at the guesthouse for 7am. There is some confusion about the time and there is a flurry to get breakfast on the table. The couple that run the place are very accommodating and want everything to be to our liking. Patrick read a Dutch comment in the guestbook: “it’s like staying with Oma and Opa”. Breakfast is served first with crepes, homemade jam and fresh squeezed apple juice. Then hard boiled eggs are added. We take these with us for later. We are also sent away with 4 crepes.

After a group photo, we are off.

The first of 3 little bumps happens right out of the driveway of the guesthouse. The second is small almost unnoticeable but the third climbs up to a town…before the 5km downhill and another 9km mostly down to the lowest point of the day.

The mosque marks the high point before the downhill

On the downhill.

Rachel comes in for a landing....the road is to the right of the landing strip

We ignore part of the RWGPS and go onto the interstate early. There is no sign indicating that bicycles are not allowed so we go for it. There is a sign indicating yield to cows, so why not bikes? Anyway, there seems to be no other way to get to Kosovo. We stop at a café/bar for coffee and again find cappuccino’s. We eat the hard boiled eggs and crepes with nutella.

It starts to rain softly, we don our rain jackets and keep riding. The trench is back as well, it ruins most of the narrow shoulder, but traffic is very light on the divided highway.

The border crossing is easy, we think maybe too easy as there is no entry post for Kosovo as we turn onto a secondary road. In retrospect, we saw two flags at the border crossing, so we think maybe the entry is done at the same time as the exit of one country into the other. We guess we’ll find out when we leave Kosovo if we needed an entry stamp. All this is done electronically now.

On the outskirts of Prirzen, we stop for lunch of a kebab. We don’t want to arrive at the hotel hungry like in Debar. Our hotel is right downtown along the river that flows through town. It is busy, may tourists seem to be walking the roads. We get a room on the second floor, carry our gear up and store the bikes in a fenced-in driveway around the corner. There are two other bikes already, we had heard that Todd and Luciana arrived here yesterday after two long days of riding.

View across from the hotel in one direction

View across from the hotel in the other direction

Patrick gets us checked in, and the bikes go in the garage

We send an email to Todd and Luciana that we have arrived. After a hot shower and settling in, we walk to the café they are in and have a coffee and cheesecake. We arrange to meet for dinner, they are in the room next to us, by “meeting at the doors at 6”. We then take a short walk around the nearby streets, find milk for breakfast, and a cold drink of lemonade.