Day 35 - Day Ride Kranjska Gora to Vršič Pass - Oh The Places You'll Go - 2025

May 15, 2025

Day 35 - Day Ride Kranjska Gora to Vršič Pass

Unloaded OAB - always fun

Short and sweet; today’s ride and today’s post.

We’ve had a great time in Slovenia, so much so that we were several days behind in getting this journal updated. We knew we were going to have a short but intense day with an out and back up Vršič pass, and with rain in the forecast for the afternoon, I’d have time to catch up on the blog. I almost made it, falling short this morning on getting some commentary for this post written.

Most of the pics have fairly informative captions, so I won’t repeat any of that. Cutting to the chase, we’ve had a great time in Slovenia and this is a wonderful place to tour, as long as you don’t mind the odd hill or two.

Tomorrow we head back into Italy and will do a ‘repeat’ section of part of our 2017 tour, but this time we’ll be riding down the Alp Adria from Kranjska / Tarvisio to Gemona, rather than riding up. It’s a rail trail so the grades aren’t that much different , but if the winds play nice with us, there shouldn’t be any real pedalling tomorrow. Anyway, that’s tomorrow, look and read on to see what happened today (i.e the 15th May) - it was great.

I always like the symmetry of the elevation profile of an OAB ride

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Putting this up front to provide some audio entertainment while you scroll through the pics.

I was going to use this for yesterday but Mr. Sprinsteen’s ‘hot of the press’ evisceration scooped this one.

Keep It Coming - BB King with Heavy D

I’n not really a rap guy, but I’ve always liked this tune (hey it’s BB!) and the sentiment - Keep it Coming - applies to days like today. More please.

Twenty five thousand words condensed into twenty five pictures …..

Start of the day, very clean (thanks again Borut) and very unloaded bikes!

that’s the objective, the gap on the right about 800 m above where we are now.

Quite interesting how all the switchbacks were the original (or well refurbished) cobblestones. Very pretty and historically accurate, but not great to ride on in either direction

Gaining elevation and the weather is still great

I think this is about switchback 7 (out of 24 in total) near the Russian chapel. This whole road is referred to as the Russian road. Next pic explains

The history ‘board’ for the chapel and road

Beautiful peaceful setting on a quiet day in May

the building is quite small, but almost perfectly dimensioned

next cool thing …. However the sun wasn’t playing along when we were here. I’m sure there’s a reference you can look up to see exactly when you need to be here to get this image. I suspect it’s in January when the sun’s trajectory is much lower

Finally at the top (well almost). All the signs said the pass was closed, but folks said bikes might get through. We were about 500 m distance and 26 m of elevation shy of the pass when we encountered this. A few folks who were loaded and on their way to Bovec did get through although they had to carry their bikes across a couple of dug out holes. We figured we were close enough and we could see that rain was on the way

So a quick retreat back to Kranjska was on!

A young American girl who we played hopscotch with on the way up coming through. She was one of the ones who continued on past the construction

down we go … not that fast actually. Tight cobblestone switchbacks don’t lend themselves to high speed cornering, at least not for us.

and even better when not in the green tunnels

back in Kranjska for lunch. Pizza (good but pretty big) and beer. As good as it gets.

and then the rain came, really hard for several hours. Great for a marathon 4 day blog catch up

SOTD

Good night from Kranjska Gora, and Slovenia! We’re back into Italy tomorrow. Slovenia’s been great and we’ll certainly be back

Today's ride: 24 km (15 miles)
Total: 1,599 km (993 miles)

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