Even though it feels like I wrote a blog yesterday. It feels like I have been bribed into doing it in the condition of privileges my parents shall experience from they organising a 6 hour drive round trip to a beautiful probably best in Romania DH tracks. Not many are there with 1 closed that only left 3 others, the old school trail, the fairy and the happy bear national DH track. I have a thing for gondolas and chair lift in an unpositive way. I did learn my lesson at bike park winterberg on my first time in 2016, I had about 45 minutes having a mental brake down at the bottom of the 300 metre elevation lift. We definitely had to start earlier off to make it back for our mothers work and a definite need for schoolwork. That meant a 6 o clock wake up for a shower before breakfast. Beginning at 7 am. Most important thing after the showers was the milk ran out in the b and b breakfast bit. Running back I had to get our own milk which was a sacrifice. The road journey was more exciting than usual but not as stressful as our previous experiences with Romanian drivers. This time it was just a mental amount of horses and carts. Dogs running around, sketchy hairpin bends. The highlight was seeing the vast flock of stalk nests. About a dozen nests on top of a row of pylons each stacking on top of the telegraph poles. The journey of eventually took two hours and 30 minutes with a load of hills and mountains getting driven up.
Our arrival was greeted with some reassurance to my lift fear. It was going pretty slowish and not wobbling at all. I hadn't seen where it went to after a couple hundred metres. But looking round the corner of industrially cut trees. Ma fewking a line up the mountain. It went on about a kilometre or two up a total gradient of 400 metres. I had promised myself and other members of my family I would go straight on there with no hesitation. Of course there will be some hesitation due to an undying fear. Since my brother and sister would really want to try this lift, my mum was forced in with her even worse fear of gondolas for no reason at all. I have a mental reason behind me not liking not being in control of my movement. Lowenna loved the idea of a gondola, yet on the way down she despised it plus at the top she became in fear of heights. In the start the other two were the ones fearful. They bought a round trip of the bottom 1000-1400 metre lift and the 1400- 2000 metres gondola. I hear stories from them that the wind really was fierce. It was cold plus many complaints of the height was had. My experience was okay in the start but at the steeper bit I panicked on the first time. Oh let's not forget the hardness of fitting two modern slack bikes in a small cable car. It wasn't too hard removing the vehiculos from our vehicle though later we will experience utter tormentation after a long ride me and my dad will have to place the bikes in the car. Enough about cable cars and onto the riding.
We didn't really know what to expect from this bike resort sinaia and the level of riding of Romanians. Hosting the Balkan DH circuit it must have had some gnarly stuff. The standard of the first trail alerted us when only being named intermediate I went real steady with my inconsistent front brake. I had to release it to full extension every time I wanted to feather the brake. Something on DH trails is really sketchy, so that's why my first run was so darn slow. Didn't help when 3 quarters of the way down, on my first run we happened to get lost. It wasn't right when we had to pedal around a hundred metres of ascent to get to the disappointingly bad old school trail. We hadn't actually noticed it snaking down the path we cycled up. Plenty of it was road anyway. Then off for our second run. Less sketchy for me this time, we saw the others coming down when we went up but the rest of the time I spent on my phone. We wanted to really see how sketchy this national DH track was like. For our second run we didn't find it that bad as we had been warmed up because I hadn't properly ridden DH tracks since winterberg. Along there was steep rooty and rocky sections that I thanked God there was no liquid on the trails (wet). Then there was some air time features. A large drop, into a step up then a 25ft table that I struggled to send. I don't know what my problem was with long tables because I usually clear gap jumps the same size. Next to that section was an offcut with a 10ft long drop with a 6 foot drop. In the next section I'd say it got less hard on the rocks though with jump there lay a massive hucker jump gap that freaked me out on how dodgy it was, between that and the extremely dodgy, sketchy and all gnarly words could describe this step down lengthening a 6ft box (6 ft long and down), you could find a 20ft long road gap (these numbers are rough btw) that pretty much had a 5ft high drop. I relieved myself of that because of injury risk plus the fact my front wheels bearings had gone bad.
That was it with the happy bear trail after two runs with a jump clearing session on the latter one. The other trail I've already described with our first go, though we shouldn't get lost on it. We did endure lunch between our second and third go I should mention that the trail order is in unchronological. Second experience out of three, we managed to find the section we so sorely missed. It wasn't that different from the rest of the fairy trail but at least didn't go uphill a single metre. I forgot to mention the features upon this track. About two or three 3 foot drops. We found a mini jump line on our last run when some walkers got in the way when it clearly says, NO WALKERS! It kind of diverted me into a freshly built line which contained three mini kickers that were fun but could've been a lot more challenging though this is a medium DH line not a medium jump line. Then we made off in time for our mothers work, I wrote the blog and did an hour's worth of maths for my school which is on the minimal side but after all my friends are doing activities week at the moment and Truro school has finished overall.
Published on Monday 16 July 2018
Comments