We are in Tirana Albania. A city that is famous in our family as the home of one of our part time daughters Linda Bardha. And, may I say once again, congratulations to Linda for just graduating with her masters from Georgetown.
Interesting ride today. Fairly easy. We started through fields and agricultural lands that were beautiful. There were groves of fruit trees, fields of vegetables, grazing land and lots of small villages. We had nice vistas so we could see quite a way over the valley as we rode. There were many people out in the fields working along with their children. There were also children herding sheep and goats. There were every type of cart hauling everything you can imagine. Some of the carts were pulled by horses, some by donkeys, some by bicycles, some by motors. People were riding donkeys, bicycles, horses, motor scooters, tractors, etc. In general we saw lots of activity. Including lots of farm animals. Lots of donkeys, goats, sheep, ducks, chickens and for the first time we saw lots of turkeys. At one point a turkey with about a dozen chicks crossed the road right in front of me. The road however was not very busy so we were not bothered by traffic. The road was also mostly in very good condition which was a great relief.
At about 70 Km we stopped for lunch right before a big mountain. On the picture of the elevations below you can see that it sticks up like a big thumb. I was a little concerned about how hard it would be since there was a total of over 5,000 feet of climbing and most of it was this mountain but it wasn’t hard at all. Either I am getting stronger or weigh less or both. After coming down off of the mountain we only had about 20Km to go into Tirana but they stopped us and held us all together until everyone got to that point and then arranged for a bus to take us the rest of the way. The reason was that there is a huge demonstration scheduled for today to complain about the current government and our leaders felt that it might have an impact on our route. If nothing else they felt that the traffic might be bad. So our mileage got cut a bit short.
Tirana is a big city and since I have a rest day here I will take pictures of it tomorrow. One thing we noticed as we drove in is that the city is very clean. We have noticed that there is very little trash next to the roads but it also extends to the towns and even the cities. Seldom do you see any trash in the roads or streets.
