Terrible sleep, considering this is a hotel night. This hotel has NO ventilation on the upper accommodation floor, except for a little window in each room, and since our room faces busy Highway #9 about 150m away, the choices are (a) close the window and suffocate in your own sweat, or (b) open the window and listen to the heavy traffic. In addition, the people in Room #107 next door are smoking in their toilet/shower area and - since the exhaust fans don't work - the smoke is infiltrating our toilet/washroom area and stinking up the whole joint. I went down the Reception twice to ask them to either (a) tell the people in Room #107 to stop smoking, or (b) change our rooms. Their response was that it's not permitted to smoke in your room. TripAdvisor is going to hear about this.
Cleaned the chain this morning, nice buffet breakfast at 7am, away by 7:30am, and the zig-zagging begins. Gergo has a fiendish way of trying to keep a straight line route from Radom to Sandomierz but it involves zigging left on every little farm road and then right on the next narrow farm road, climbing 11% gradient hills and swooping down into little river valleys then thumping across those narrow little bridges, just to hold a course approximating 174 degrees.
It's a wonderful way to experience the countryside, to enjoy the cherry
and apple orchards, the golden fields of ripening wheat, the quaint little farming villages; but it's a hell of a lot of work and concentration for a cyclist. After all, most of his sharp turns are at the bottom of steep hills when you're crouched down over the handlebars and approximating the speed of sound, voila! orange marking tape on the left!! Brake hard, turn when you're under control, then realise that you haven't shifted down and are still in the 8th gear of the upper range of gears. Yeech! Time for start all over again.
Dan & Shirley (USA) catch up to me at the 78km mark and I tag along with them to 'get my head back into the game'. We stop at an ABC mini-market at the 92km mark and the Gatorade and chocolate bar do their magic. Although we leave the store together, I leave them in the proverbial dust. Zig, zag, merge onto Highway #77, swoop into and through Sandomierz, down the hill on the bicycle path, crank a hard right at Camp Browarny, and it's over. Turn off the Garmin at 108.78km, Chris and Peter have already arrived (so what's new?), head over to a nearby service station for 1L of Cherry Coke to toast my arrival.
Pitch the tent close to the TDA van so I don't miss the call for supper, showers at the Handi-Cap WC are lovely, do my laundry in the dishwashing sink, then re-hydrate my body while I do some blog/photo time,
Sandomierz is quite properly famous for its Old City, so after supper is out of the way, George and I climb up the hill behind our campground for a closer look at the town square and assorted buildings.
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