September 24, 2026. Trieste, Italy to Motovun, Croatia. 58 miles. 3,401’ climbing.
Although the first 10 miles getting out of Trieste were nothing special, and busy city traffic type riding, the rest of the day was (as planned) a series of small stops each interesting.
We made a quick stop in Muggia (the last Italian town in Istria) where we visited Piazza Guglielmo Marconi. The squares is named in tribute to Marconi who I knew developed the first commercial wireless communications. Though he’s not a native of this region, he’s honored as a source of national pride. I wondered if not for Marconi, would we have an iPhone for me to type this blog and email it?
We soon entered a sliver of Slovenia. The country only has 29 miles of coastline on the Adriatic, in the northern Gulf of Trieste.
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| The old border station which was once a hive of activity was more like a ghost town building. Since 2006 Slovenia joined the Schengen area of Europe, allowing free passage without any border control. |
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| Our first Slovenian bike sign. We could not tell if this meant no cyclists or watch out for cyclists next 8km. We didn’t bother to translate until later and happily learned it’s the latter. |
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| From Koper to Izola was an amazing coastal bike path as one can find with separate lanes for cyclist from pedestrians. |
It was interesting to us as we’ve been fortunate to visit Slovenia previously, but never thought of it as a coastal country. We had visited and highly recommend the more typical spots of Lake Bled, Julian Alps, Bohinj and Ljubljana. Today’s coastal towns with Venetian heritage were clearly worth visiting, but culturally very different with their Italian (Venetian) influence.
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| Izola harbor with lots of modern boats was a snack and drink stop. It still retains its fishing town roots. |
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| For part of the ride we rode sections of the 123km Parenzana bike trail, including a few tunnels, that runs on an old narrow rail line through all 3 countries. |
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| Tartini Square in Piran, Slovenia to honor Giuseppe Tartini, a famous composer and violinist. He was a native son, but back when this was part of the Republic of Venice. Those in the know (not me!) may recognize his name as he pioneered modern violin playing. The “Square” (not sure why called a square, when really a giant oval) is fabulous. |
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| Another section of the Parenzana trail and those threatening storm clouds were more cloud cover than I’d like, but luckily missed us. I felt 2 drops of water but the rain held off. |
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| The Sečovlje salt pan. Seawater here is channeled into shallow sections and left to evaporate leaving just sea salt. This is a traditional harvesting method used here for many centuries. We first saw this and learned about this process in India where we’d also see people walking back and forth in the shallow basins with rakes to harvest the salt. |
A place to think about next time I have 100% natural (produced by sea, sun and wind) sea salt, especially Croatian or Slovenian.
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| Crossing into Croatia we had pleasant village roads with stone walls. |
Next stop Groznjan, a cute artist town about 10 miles before our final stop. And here we enjoyed lunch with a spectacular view and accompanied by our first ever “guest walker”. We’ve had guest riders in every one of our previous epics, but today our guest had to walk an hour to us from where she’s working and living at a farm-to-table restaurant inn.
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| What a delight to have Sabrina, daughter of our good friends from back home in NY, join us. She pioneered the guest walker just as her dad Stu co-pioneered the guest rider role back in Las Cruces and El Paso on our Southern Tier ride in 2021. (He reappeared in Season 4, episode 22; plus Season 3, episode 16 with son Jacob.) |
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| Not easy riding on these ancient medieval stones. It makes me happy that we are both riding tubeless tires, so we are not going to get pinch flats (where the tube gets pinched) but we can still get puncture flats. (Knock wood). |
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| A sign of how popular the biking culture is that when we got to this restaurant for lunch at 2pm, we were the first two bikes outside and there were no others. When we came out, there were about 20, several also with panniers. (Would it be safe to leave all your belongings on your bike unwatched for 90 minutes in New York?) |
The first 35 miles today were flat (lovely!) but that meant the day’s climb was concentrated in our last 25.
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| As we’ve often said, not all miles are created equally, and neither are the days of our lives. |
It was a long slow climb up to Groznjan for lunch as Medieval towns were built on the high ground for protection against attack. They didn’t know centuries later cycling tourism would be important.
Then downhill after lunch into a valley floor for 8 more flat miles.
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| Cyclists love descending on long straightaways where you can really fly. And also love hairpin turns that are more fun for cornering. Oh yeah, Heather doesn’t like either. Nor does she “corner”. She is remarkably consistent riding pretty much the same way regardless. |
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| With our final destination Motovun in the distance, and a perspective on the climb ahead. |
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| Fifteen minutes closer and our B&B is on the very top, a final 2 miles of climb. |
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| After the last 500’ of climb on slippery, well-polished cobble stones, the view was worth it. |
Motovun and Istria is a truffle center. There are many tastings and you can go on an outing to find them in the wild. We learned they’re a fungus but not really a mushroom. They grow underground but without roots so you can’t plant and harvest them. They’re found in the wild by specially trained dogs and it takes 1 to 4 years to fully train them. The dogs hunt and find them by scent and dig in the spot. This process plus the inability to farm at scale and the short shelf life is why truffles cost so much.
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| Fresh truffles. You scrub the earth off with a brush. Tastes way better than it sounds. |
As the saying goes, when in Rome… well when in Motovun, we capped off a fantastic first day sharing two different delicious truffle pastas. Yum!
I probably couldn’t even place the Istrian Peninsula by name on a map before I started planning this adventure a few months ago. So much to see, learn and experience here that it could be its own tour alone.
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We ride to raise funds for the Christopher and Dana Reeve Foundation. They are dedicated to curing spinal cord injury and improving the quality of life of those impacted by paralysis. Thank you to so many of you who have already generously donated an amazing total over $16,000! If you’ve not yet had a chance to support the Reeve Foundation, please consider making a gift at Heather & Mark Ride for Reeve.
© Copyright Mark Segal 2026.
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