Day 19: Varna - Sozopol

Hello everyone:

I am already writing you from Sozopol, our destination for the day. We arrived about one hour ago, just the time to find ourselves a room to settle down and get ready to "attack" the town. We were expecting a quiet small town by the sea, but so far we are still looking for the first adjective. The streets are full of people from all ages and the bars you can find every two doors are promising a nice night out. No one is complaining, anyway.

We had about 190 km of nice road today, either with the sea as background or fighting with some tuff mountains. We had a calm journey in perspective, but reality proved to be otherwise. For the first time since we left Porto, I saw Le Deuch struggling to keep on going. Since Bucharest, the accelerator was constantly getting stuck, making Le Deuch in constant acceleration. So far nothing new: just a slight kick by my well trained right foot and the engine could rest again. But when we had about 1.30h on the road this afternoon, there was no miracle kick putting the engine to some rest. The accelerator was simply always on.

This happened when we were dealing with a considerably steep hilly road. Going up, no much of a problem, but things were different going down: we had to go always on 4th gear, to make the acceleration as light as possible and, obviously, over forcing the breaks in each turn. With the heat "joining the party", the need for a stop became inevitable, but only possible down the hill. Always at 10/20 km/h, and with the handbrake helping just in case, we had no trouble making it to the nearest village. To save the face of our hero, soon we came across an old truck struggling even more then him. We just had to follow behind, with the truck being the only one to blame for the long, long queu behind us.

Despite his age, Le Deuch has a remarkable regenerative capability. With our guest mechanical engineer overlooking the process, it took about half an hour for the breaks to cool down and be back on track. But the main problem needed an a genious touch of the Portuguese only skill of "desenrascanco" (how to translate this?! remember Mackgiver, always finding a way? let's say he could get a Portuguese passport based on that). For big problems in plain systems, plain solutions, that was the motto for Nuno. With a piece of rubber found on the ground, he managed to oil a piece in the engine's carburator and no more stucking accelerator! Just in case, we stopped at the nearest beach for a nice dive, giving my little one some extra rest.

Around 7pm there we were back on the road. Till Sozopol we finally had the quiet and calm driving we had in our plans.

Time to hit the town.
Kisses and Hugs,
TMA