The road from our campsite under the bridge to the next town over of Petrovac was a 15 km straight shot that undulated gently but never turned into a proper climb or descent. The weather today was much cooler than it had been for the past month. Ever since we crossed into Slovenia it was balmy and hot every day. Now it was a bit overcast and there was a slight chill in the breeze. As we rode along the road we started to notice the leaves on the trees were beginning to turn into the gold and red colours of Autumn. It seemed as though the season had changed overnight. 

 
Out of Petrovac we rode on the flat, but soon we rounded a corner and saw mountains looming up to our left in a long continuous ridge save for a deep grove, a gorge, that looked like a gateway in some massive wall.

  
Our path actually took is through the gorge, along the course of the river that ran through it. Climbing up higher into the mountains we realised how much we actually enjoyed the uphill struggle, not only was the riding more interesting but it also often led to more interesting places.

 

 
  
This wasn’t some pass to be crossed, panting up switchbacks though. This was a nice long, winding route to through relatively small (highest peak only went up to 1500m) mountains. We passed by small towns, farms, barns, little orthodox churches. We were passed by all sorts of trucks, tractors, soviet-era motorbikes and horse drawn carts – and cars, too.

 

   
At the end of the day we came upon the strange town of Resavica, one of these places out in the middle of nowhere that someone had decided to drop a couple of high rise apartment blocks around. The town itself served as the terminus for what seemed to be an industrial freight only railway.
We decided to see if we could find somewhere for dinner here. The firs place we tried told us to go to the hotel.

“Where is the Hotel?”

“It’s big red building”

The hotel was, indeed, a big red building. I’d say it hadn’t been red when it was built, but somewhere along the line someone decided that it would be a good idea to spruce it up a bit by painting the whole thing red with a bright blue trim. In this drab Serbian town it stood out like a sore thumb. We were the only people in the whole establishment, we ordered “something good”(the whole menu being in Cyrillic) and got a plate of two big pieces of pork and a side of veg and fries each (€5). 
Well fed we left Resavica behind and rode uphill for about ten minutes until we found somewhere to turn off the road and camp in amongst the trees.