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01-15-21 | 04:15 AM

#24

Geepig

Senior Member

Joined: Sep 2020

Posts: 745

Likes: 206

From: Eastern Poland

Bikes: Romet Jubilat x 4, Wigry x 1, Turing x 1

The weather had been cold all week, but on Saturday it rose to about 6 degrees centigrade and the wind dropped to almost nothing, much better than the snow that had been predicted earlier. Tigger was ridden around to the car, folded and fitted, along with the set of Nordic walking poles for wifie plus a picnic including a flask of hot krupnik soup, another of coffee, bread for the soup and some other little niceties. Twenty years or so ago and the best you could hope for in such a small town were some benches in the town square alongside the town drunks or a Communist era restaurant/bar on its final legs - or heading to become a pizza house.

Bełżyce is only some 15 km away from home, a nice little PKS bus journey away when we first visited two decades ago, and indeed we had an OK coffee in the local bar, all in the classic 1960s communist style. Today the building survives, a couple of streets from the main square, but other businesses have walked in and out since. There is now a pizza and kebab place on one corner of the square, but our long experience marked it out as another small-town ‘meh’ eatery. Instead when it came to eat we used the picnic place near the lake, the former popular since Poland joined the EU, with its focus on small town funding.

We parked up in the Church overflow car park, and had not been there two minutes before I found myself inveigled in a conversation about bikes with a local. I made my way through it, even though I have low confidence in my Polish - but luckily my bike vocabulary is not too bad.

Even though we have a small car, Tigger fits in more than easily.

The choice of car park was no accident, as many years ago we had discovered a very straight and narrow path that led away from the town toward the nearby village of Wzgórze, which since has been widened and hardened to take cars. The first time we were here I was busy building the most massive private website in Poland, solely about this region and everything in it. Later Wikipedia came on and I moved onto other things, but parts of the website still survive - including some of the town and village pages I created. Here is what I wrote about and saw in Bełżyce and Wzgórze all that time ago: Bełżyce & Wzgórze, a small town and village in Lubelskie, Poland

Wifie strode off with her sticks, while I rode around the carpark to check the bike was functioning normally before I headed off onto the good crushed ash surface. The sun was on the weak side, but the going was good and, if you can deal with a mainly flat landscape, it was beautiful in a way that makes my heart sing even though this is not my native land: it just looks comfortable, like an ancient and well-loved leather sofa, but less lumpy and no one loses the remote.

Some of the wooden cottages remain, but the few that do are showing their age more clearly, and the further we went the more new builds we saw. We were surprised when we came across some paddocks with horses, as over the last two decades even the poorest farmers have switched to tractors, partly because the more well to do ones are now able to switch to newer models and the prices for secondhand ones have dropped as a consequence. Occasionally I do still see ‘motor horses’ and homemade tractors, and occasionally a horse pulling a cart - but I cannot recall when I last saw a horse ploughing.

When we reached what one might call the centre of the village we passed the fires station, but there was no bar selling hot food and drinks, and we have no memory where it was located. There is a house attached to the end of the fire station, so perhaps that was it.

While wifie carried on, I investigated where the lane that crossed ours went, in both directions. It was called ‘Szkolna’, so I was not surprised to find a school where it joined the main road, and in the other it headed off out between the fields.

If you ever check the satellite images for Europe then as you move east a change in field shape and size takes place as you move across Poland, becoming smaller and thinner. This is the land of strip fields, typically with one end close to a river or stream so that everyone had access to water. Roads often parallel the rivers, cutting across the fields with meadow on the river side and crop on the other. Head further east and cross the border into Belarus or Ukraine and the fields become huge again - welcome to the land of Communist state farms. And yet if you look closely, you can still see the previous strip fields as discolorations on the land.

Clearly I have carefully positioned Tigger to make this massive bridge look smaller than it really is.

The new handlebars make turning much easier, as my knees do not tend to clip the bars on tight turns. This is very handy on a lane as I can comfortably turn round to go back and talk to wifie, for example. As the weather has been dry recently there was no problem with grip when I ventured onto the meadow to let a car pass, although the ever present sand can be fun as it overflows onto the tarmac of the lanes we cross. Some offroad tires really would be nice.

As is usual there were plenty of dogs waiting for us in their gardens, although as we got to the less frequented end of the lane they must have thought it was their holiday, and engaged in much barking, running and spinning around - twice, because we came back. There was one small dog running free that I saw nip another dog, then he came over to glare at me but got a stoney ‘I am quite prepared to kick you and chase you down to do it repeatedly look’ in return.

At the end of the lane, where it turned abruptly to the right and became merely a field road, we turned around and headed back, with one short diversion to follow a short parallel road where I could enjoy the remnants of the paving that had once formed our lane as well as cross the narrow concrete bridge over the stream. The stream for the most part remains unseen from the lane, except where it meanders, and of course the frequent fish ponds, but where it did run close to the lane there were visible signs of major and current beaver damage to the trees on either side. There were some trees down, some which are beyond saving and others with cloth or fencing wrapped round to prevent further damage.

It was a good ride, and a small river or stream usually makes for a good ride, although at this time of year experimenting with crossing the fords or sitting on the banks is out of the question. Tigger again took everything in its stride, and I only had to tighten the handlebars once. Next time I might take a brush to remove some of the sandy soil from the tires before it goes back in the car.

We sat for a while overlooking the lake, as we had our soup and coffee, talking about previous visits and where we should go when the weather gets warmer.

The more you look, the more you see, a Romet Zenit - a variant of the Jubilat and sharing similar equipment that I have planned for Blue.

While we were on the return leg of the trip we passed a small building site with two older bikes leaning against the wall of the house being constructed. One was clearly a variation of the Jubilat, but marked ‘Zenit’ and had some kind of derailleur.

Much mooching around on the Polish language bike forums after we got back and I discovered that it was a Romet and dated back to the 1990s - which matches up to its condition. I never did get a final answer as the specification or why the name change, but there was a lot of talk about Favorit derailleurs with 3 or 5 speeds depending on which factory assembled them, and maybe even Shimano hubs. Another mystery to be solved, I will be keeping an eye out for another that I can approach closer.

#romet #rower #bicycle #wigry #jubilat #shopper #poland #polska