Back in the Sedlo Again...

Here in Eastern Slovakia, the mountains aren't high enough to have real passes, but we have saddles, or 'sedlo's. My cycling map suggested that Sedlo Priehyby ('sagging saddle'?) north of Sabinov might be a good destination, so I put the bike in the car and started riding from downtown Sabinov. After a couple of miles on the highway, I turned up a nice side valley past some small villages and a couple of squalorous Roma settlements. As the route description indicated, the road got pretty bad after Majdan

where I passed an old woman with a chain saw, the last person I'd see for the next hour or so. The road climbed up a narrow valley, eventually doing a long switchback to reach the saddle. There were too many trees for a good view. If you have a couple of hours to burn, you can hike from here to a place called 'Lazy',


which apparently means 'remote mountain settlement' in Slovak. I started down the north side of the saddle and soon found some of the newest cleanest smoothest pavement I've seen in Slovakia, out there in the middle of nowhere. Unfortunately, it only lasted about half a mile and the road went back to dirt, so I turned around (if I'd gone to the bottom of the other side it would have been a 35 mile trip back to Sabinov). The descent from the top would have been better on a mountain bike - a very rough road with sharp-looking stones. I had to stop three times to get the feeling back in my hands. Back in one of the villages lower down, I stopped at some place that advertised itself as an 'espresso shop'. Personally, I don't consider anything made from instant Nescafe to be espresso, but it was warm.

Some more nice backroads

took me back to Sabinov, where I saw The Shop on Main Street where the film of the same name (Oscar winner, 1966) was made.

I'll have to get it from Netflix again to see if I recognize anything.