Balkins August 26, 2018 Belgrade, Serbia

8:45 pm.  Long day on the bike today leaving Sibiu, Romania at around 9:30 am and checking into our Belgrade hotel around 5:30 pm local which is one hour earlier than Romanian time so around 9 hours total and 260 miles.  As far as miles go, we have ridden longer distances in one day.  However, we lost time in traffic, an unruly GPS, some rain and crossing the border from Romania to Serbia.  The border crossing was mainly 2 immigration checks, one leaving Romania and one entering Serbia. We were on a remote 2 lane road so it was pretty quick.  No customs, lines or crowds.  The personnel were friendly and didn't hassle us at all.  Though they were adamant that I not take any pictures of the crossing area, which is understandable, I guess.  The picture below is one they said I could take just inside the Sebian border.  Sooz wants me to mention that the female Serbian border guard had her nails done just like women in the US.

There was major construction underway on several sections of the main A1 highway that my GPS did not acknowledge so when we got on the detour the GPS was useless. So luckily Susie's phone was able to access Google maps which did the job.

The countryside was not unusual except for a couple rock formations that looked like western US.  Some parts reminded me of inland south Florida south of Lake Okeechobee,  except of endless sugarcane fields we saw endless fields of sunflowers and corn; long, straight, 2 lane rural roads.  A picture is below of Sooz sitting on the bike in the middle of nowhere.  

For dinner Sooz found a traditional, no frills Serbian restaurant about a 15 minute walk from our hotel.  I had goulash which cost about $6.60 US, and Sooz had about a 12 ounce perfectly prepared steak for about $13.00 US.  She couldn't eat it all even with me helping.

We have a new currency,  the dinaro which is about 100 to $1 US.  Prices look expensive but they're not.

The Serbian language is indecipherable. There really is no way to even get a basic understanding by reading it.  The Romanian language is kind of a mishmash of Italian, German, French and even a little bit of Spanish, so there is some familiarity of letters and words.  But Serbian, forget it.

Gas is expensive, about $6.00 US a gallon and was hard to find out in the boonies. The little towns we went through had virtually no commercial or retail businesses to speak of. 

About 30 miles before Belgrade we stopped at a cemetery.  I have a picture below.  The grave sites were the most lavish and well maintained I've ever seen. We didn't walk the whole site but there were recent as well as older graves.  I thought we might see a lot of graves from the war period of 1991-1995, but we didn't.