As a part of my travel from Denmark to China I would like to dedicate this story to the Steemit cycling community and entry challenge "RIDESTORY" hosted by @captaincanary.

A bit of background story: I entered Albania with a guy from Germany that I have been biking with the last couple of days through Albania. At one point we decided to get away from the busy highway(yes, you bike on highways here) and head into a narrow road leading through the mountains of Albania - a decision that might not have been the wisest.

The beginning of the road

When we got to the road that would lead us through the mountains, it surprised us how perfect the road was, except for a extreme uphills of 18-20% steep, the quality of the road was excellent, not something you would expect from Albania. We almost thought it was too good to be true... And indeed it was too good to be true.

The deceptive road took us deeper and deeper into the mountains and while the constant uphill was hard, we thought it was amazing to be so far from everything and anyone and with the speed we were going we could make it to the next town in a day. So we decided to camp in the mountains our first night, watching the sun set and getting some well needed sleep.

Even turtles came down from the mountains to greed us, they kind of shocked us at first because they crawled under our tents. Asking why there are turtles in these mountains? ... Albania, that's why.

The day it all went wrong

The next morning we continued into the mountains and we could see on the offline map I used that we were soon halfway through.

Then suddenly the road became some tracks made for anything but wheels.

early in the sudden change of road we met a guy cruising on a donkey(he even let me try to ride it as seen above). He told us with the limited English he had that we should turn back and take the main route around the mountains, basically making us backtrack a whole day. We thought we had come too far so we ignored his advice and continued. Probably the most stupid moment of the whole story if you ask me, never ignore a locals advice, they always know better.

A lot of times we had to leave one bike behind to push the other up the mountain together. Then go down again to get the other bike up the same way

The route became worse and worse but the further we went the more stubborn we became, we had gone too far into all this that it would take ages to get out. We dragged the bikes all the way because it was impossible to bike on all these huge, loose and sharp rocks.

Eventually the road split in two and we had to take a wild guess where to go. Dragging us even deeper into a place where we should have turned around long time ago.

The sour bite

There was nothing but a few abandoned houses and there was no way of knowing if we even were in the right direction anymore. With degrees as high as 38 and our water running low, we had to make the decision to turn back where we came from, forcing us more than a day worth of backtracking.

We were so exhausted and it was first time of my trip that I had to back off and turn around, the Albanian mountains truly kicked my ass and taught me how important it can be to know your limits and make the call if needed, maybe next time I would call it off a little earlier. But nonetheless it was the right call to make.

We eventually got back on the road and there was no better feeling than being back on an actual road, you know, that we could cycle on. We enjoyed the long ride down hill towards the town we left the other day, they did remember us because not many bikers comes through these parts and you could really see them wondering why we were here again. I got to be honest I felt a little stupid.

we ended up drinking a "couple" of refreshing drinks.

Hope you enjoyed my story of the road that led to nothing, Albania is truly a interesting country and i have many more stories to share about this interesting place in Europe. If you ever go there don't ever underestimate their roads.

Stay awesome!

-Holm