Our reward for feeding the dog’s last night, was for 2 of the dog’s to chase us of the “campsite” while the 3rd dog guarded the exit. I slowly crept behind Lee forcing him to take the brunt of it, because I’m nice like that.

Now that the trip is nearing the end I’ve opted for directness when it comes to choosing the route. Which meant the motorway was to be our port of call. We had no problems with authority this time as the police, (who could usually be found idly hanging around service stations), more often than not spoke to us about our trip and we got waved through the toll gates for free.

One downside to riding on motorways is that they are often boring as hell and before you know it 75 miles of monotony has passed beneath your wheels, only broken up by rest breaks in identical service stations. The roads are smooth and the shoulders wide and with Istanbul a week or so away, I don’t mind.

I must also add that the people have been extremely friendly, we are getting good luck wishes from many of the people we meet and the Turkish truck drivers that frequent the motorway nearly always peep and wave. We are quite literally getting peeped at every 2-3 minutes and it’s getting quite tiring on the arm’s to respond to all of them.

Southern Serbia brought a much needed change, as the motorway ended the road passed through deep gorges in the mountains meaning the road stayed pretty much flat, interupted by the occasional tunnel. As night fell we came across a lonely looking petrol station, manned by well a man. He seemed pleased to have some company and we asked if we could camp behind his shop. “No problem” he replied.

We made an early start for Bulgaria and after about 5 checkpoints at the border we were finally in. We soon realised we had no Bulgarian money on us and the only reliable place for a cash machine would be in Sofia, Welcome to Bulgaria100kms away. If this wasn’t bad enough we had little food, one bottle of water each and the temperature had just crept past 35C.

We pulled into a service station hoping they would accept Visa but just as we stepped in the woman behind the counter kept saying “No shop, no shop” “WHAT” it was quite clearly a shop. Anyway we sulked off and got back on the bikes thinking of Peter Heath’s advice from way back in Finland that something always turns up as long as you keep pedalling. About an hour later something did, but they didn’t accept Visa but Euro’s were Ok. We managed to find 2.70 Euros between us which was enough for a couple of Fanta’s each. Heaven never tasted sweeter.

This was enough to see us through to Sofia, where we decided to have our final rest day before the end.