Where have I been...?

I've been away from Steemit for a while, figuratively and literally. I got the chance to do some travelling and some outdoors stuff, and a new contract mutated into a full-time day job, so I didn't have a lot of time to post here (and to be honest the vibe around the 'experiment' soured the atmosphere for me. But anyhooo...

I thought I'd share some highlights of a trip to Sofia, capital of Bulgaria, back in the Spring. And I'll start with the high point of the trip (again, both literally and figuratively) when we climbed Sofia's towering neighbour, Mt Vitosha.

Well, I say we climbed, but the easiest way up Vitosha is to use the Communist-era cable car. Exhilarating, nerve-racking, it creaked and groaned through the pine woods up towards the snowline...

... casting our shadow on the river of rock that poured beneath us.

In one of those brain-glitches I'm prone to, I'd seen the snow on Vitosha as we'd flown in to Sofia, and from the bars of Vitosha Boulevard I'd looked up at the blinding white peak. But the notion that we'd have to drop from the cable car onto a ski slope, and crunch through snow to the summit hadn't really processed.

We took this heroic skier's advice and headed downhill...

From the river of stones, we came through birchwoods to a real stream cutting through the rocky landscape.

Mountain bikers whirred past, high in the branches, using the ski-lifts to get themselves and their bikes to the top.

And more evidence that this was a wild landscape in full human use...

The river guided us downhill. Dobry den, said the walkers we passed, and dobry den we said in return. Good day! Good day!

And where the stream widened and the gradient eased, we met families and couples coming uphill, and we turned aside to follow them up to the tranquil grounds of Dragalevski monastery, in whose dappled shade we watched a middle-aged priest chop logs for the winter's fire.

And just outside the monastery gates, a man was selling cold beers from a stall near a wooded glade. That cold bottle of Kamenitza went down really well.