Шумен (Shumen)-Варна (Varna).

Trip dist: 99 kms. Trip time: 7 hrs, 12 mins. Tot dist: 7,075 kms.

Celebrations VII/Black Sea, here I come!.

Ha ha. Today I shamelessly rode on the A2 (a motorway!) with Jesper. The locals said it was no problem for bikes and it was a nice road, with wide shoulders that even allowed for some good side-by-side riding at times, which made things far less lonely.

It should've been an easy ride: there's a 400 m net elevation loss between Shumen and Varna, but as it happens we constantly had the wind against and towards the end there were even some hills. We also got rained on: got completely wet, and then got dry not because of the sun (which not for an instant made an appearance throughout the day), but due to the strong wind, which, as I said, was relentlessly against us, for pretty much all of the journey.