On the road - 1

Even the most dedicated gardeners must sometimes travel for one reason or another. In our case, the reason was our talented offspring, who qualified for the finals in a national art competition, set to take place in Bulgaria’s Mediaeval capital, Veliko Tarnovo.

The weather was rather nice, the landscape pleasant (ignore the guardrails), and we set off cheerfully for a not very long, easy ride. Of course, we should’ve known better.

If you look at the map of Bulgaria, you’ll see it’s quite neatly divided into two halves by the literal Balkan mountain range, locally known as Stara Planina (Old Mountain). Stara Zagora is below. Veliko Tarnovo is above. All roads between the two include a mountain pass. One of them, the Pass of the Republic, looks like this. The other one, the Shipka Pass, looks like this:

Obviously, any sane person would pick the Pass of the Republic over what Cat calls the Spaghetti Pass. There was just one problem, which we were reminded of when we reached the entry point of the Pass of the Republic: it is more often closed than it is open, mostly because of the weather. When we happily approached the entry we were stopped by police who informed us that the pass was closed, so we had to go through Shipka. Which meant we had to basically go back where we’d come from, adding an hour to our travel time.

Sane Cris was annoyed. Car sick-prone Cat was anxious. But we had no choice. The magnificent views were a bonus for some (Irina) and little comfort for others (the Cs). This is how the Shipka Pass looks while you’re on it.

Then the weather changed because it always does at these altitudes, where you are literally in the clouds (if the clouds are low, that is). What followed were several kilometers in fairy tale land, from the Brothers Grimm’s collection.

Four hairpin turns and numerous lesser ones later we were in the North and on straighter roads. Cris, who’d been to Tarnovo once before, swore that if it’s rainy again, 30 years after that first visit, he would disavow the city. Cat was happy to not be sick any more. And Irina was eager to return to a city which she had visited last in her childhood. Yeah, we don’t really travel much. A brand new tunnel later, here it was, Veliko Tarnovo.

It was not raining, we got to our hotel without incidents, and the hotel surprised us with a resident cat who, as usual, immediately took to Cris.

We took the presence of the cat (by the name of Houston, no less) to be a good sign and went to register Cat for the competition, thinking our troubles were over. Spoiler for part 2: they weren’t.