After climbing over 1,000 meters out of Dubrovnik, with bad attitudes thanks to our new routine of waking up early, we crossed the border into Montenegro.  The decision to take such drastic actions (setting an alarm for 5:30 am!) was forced on us by a heat tsunami that has ravaged the coast and seems to forever extend inland.  All the additional precautionary water we brought was dumped on Anna’s head to relieve her fear of overheating and heat stroke.  We slowly scurried from scrap of shade to scrap of shade up the steep mountain switchbacks.

We were wholly unprepared for our ride through Piva Canyon.  Transfixed by the surrounding beauty we failed to notice the veiled danger.  Mainly, an inordinate amount of unlit tunnels with poor road surfaces.  Our lighting situation consists of 5 working LEDs in the twilight of their “superbright” existence.  I know it’s the batteries fault, and every time I turn it on I say, “I should get new batteries.”  And every time I turn it off, I’m thinking about… I don’t even remember what I was saying.

I never realized how important seeing the ground is for biking, but as soon as it disappeared in the tunnel my confidence in being a person who knows how to balance went straight to zero.  “I feel like I’m floating,” followed by, “I feel like I’m CRASHING!”  The situation is made more impossible by the pocked surface of the road.  There are pot-holes and boulders everywhere.  Not just American style, call this number to fill in my pot-hole, these are catastrophic pot-holes, sometimes 12 feet deep (NOT AN EXAGGERATION!) “I don’t even know how you would get out of there,” we mused peering into a seemingly bottomless pit.  

There are even warning signs along the road that alert you of BLACK HOLES!  The signs feature a giant black dot that says CRNA (which i know to mean black) and then something else in Cyrillic that must mean hole… I’d have to double check with Stephen Hawking.  (Anna interjects that it just means blind spot, literally black point.  But given the propensity of bottomless pits following the warning signs, I’m not easily convinced.)

We survived solely by the politeness and vigilance of the Bosnian drivers who transformed our nightmares into small unattended parades as they slowly followed behind us, lighting the way with their headlights.   

Not surprisingly we survived all this exaggerated turmoil and decided to keep up the days intensity by visiting a town famous for it’s rape camp in the 90’s and a concentration camp memorial.

These facts were mostly ignored as the priority in the town was to find an ATM, and the priority at the memorial was to beef up the quality of my Instagram feed.