Traditional wooden house in Osturna
The grim faced owner of the hotel seemed offended that we wanted to pop out to the shop before breakfast and motioned us to sit down. There was no menu, she brought us a basket of white bread, a plate of cheese, cucumber and tomato and meat slices, even though she knew we didn’t eat it from last night’s dinner. And a cup of tea each, I prefer coffee but didn’t think it worth arguing the point.
The weather had turned wet again, though not as cold as last week. Our route was to take us through the Dunajec gorge but I must have failed to notice it took a more direct route to Zdiar, missing the narrow section further south. We stopped at a cafe to use their WiFi to replan it and download to our Wahoo devices, while enjoying coffee and cheesecake. We continued downstream but came to a closed section with no information about a way round. The Wahoo rerouting facility generally works well, but it initially told us to proceed and then to turn back. The road was taking us in the wrong direction so we rode back past the cafe to a bridge where we rejoined the original route.
All this took a long time and added 15 km (9 miles). An unpleasant run along a busy narrow main road with periodic sections of poor quality cycle path mercifully came to an end when we turned off and started to enjoy some misty views of fields and hills, more dramatic than the other countries we’ve visited on this holiday. We knew that most of the ascents would come towards the end, and we were more tired than expect after the earlier faffing. The last climb was really hard, lasting seven miles, after which came a long freewheel into the long strung out ski resort village of Zdiar. We are out of season so the nearby restaurants were closed, and we were too late for the shop so had to cook a very basic meal from the food we had: bread and one courgette!