Day 22 – Donji Milanovic to Drobeta-Turnu Severin

In going through the guide book, I come across some interesting text that somehow I had managed to miss previously.  One said that there were no accommodations for a good 40 mile stretch within which I had planned for us to stay; and then there was this nugget of joy: “Calafat is the last town with half-way acceptable accommodations….” With the travails of the past two days, we abandoned my original plan of riding almost 90 miles, and instead opt for just going to the first major town over the border in Romania, or not quite 50 miles, and figuring things out there. There are not places serving breakfast in Donji Milanovac, so we go to a bakery and have some pastries, then have some coffee and orange juice at another place, then go to the grocery store and buy some milk and cereal to take back to the apartment.; two bowlfuls each and the cereal is gone. As we are talking with the manager while readying to leave, we discover that there was a laundry machine we could have used. Oh, well. We also discover that his main job is a hair dresser, and I could have gotten a (munch-needed) haircut. Oh, well, again. We are no longer paying attention to the Official Route, and I check today’s roads with Garmin Connect (thanks, Fatma!) to see how steep they are: they are.  The first major uphill comes at 12.5 miles, but it isn’t nearly as bad as the previous day; how could it be? Another ascent brings us to the Iron Gates, where the Danube, 3 kilometers wide at the beginning of the day, narrows to just 150 meters. We meet an English couple coming the other way who are making their way back home from India! Another uphill and we stop at a lookout to see a huge modern carving of Decebalus Rex, a face in the side of the mountain on the Romanian side of the last King of Dacia. There is a busload of Polish tourists already there, and their guide asks us where we are from and where we are biking. After explaining it to her people, several of them ask to take our picture. We then have the steepest ascent of the day, still not equalling yesterday, but requiring stops nonetheless. The long descent into the village of Tekija sees hit the 1,000 mile mark.  We celebrate with a picture, then continue on to the border and cross the dam into Romania. We find a restaurant that advertises “real Balkan taste”, but we pick mainly for the being the first place open that we came to. It had a great views, an exhaustive menu, and free wifi, so we were all set.  We worked on our standard vocabulary in Romanian, booked a hotel, and then rode into town to find it, meeting with yet another ascent to kick us a little bit more at the end of the day.