It was cold and wet the day I started to ride south from Trieste. It turns out that I had to ride through a small sliver of Slovenia to get to Croatia, so I got to add another country “visited” to my passport.
The road also became unsafe with more bumps/potholes a lot of semi-trucks wizzing by and honking at me. I had no shoulder or parallel road so I don’t really know what they’re expecting from me. It was scary to ride on and was not helping my mood.
That first night I stayed in hostel in Rijeka that began to feel a lot different than Italy. The town was pretty industrial and EVERYONE smoked. The hostel was cheap though, only $15 per night.
The next day I learned about a thing called Bora and boy was is hard to ride in! My bike had a lot of bags on it which basically acted like a sail whenever the wind blew. So it became very difficult to ride in a straight line for a lot of the day. I was very nervous about swerving into the lane when a car could come up behind me and collide. I even had to walk for about a quarter mile through some of it because it was just too strong to ride through. It was definitely the worst wind I’ve been in.
The next few days I stayed in Senj, Starigrad and Šibenik. The days were pretty uneventful, but the scenery was definitely improving as I rode south (and the the Bora wind was dying down too!). It felt like riding along the California coast most of the days, and I could see more and more resort-looking towns on the coast. I also rode through decaying small farm towns that seemed to have been left behind somehow from the fall of Yugoslavia. Half-built houses or destroyed houses were common.