There comes a time in every trip that we start to get pretty spent and need to take a day to recharge.  Today was that day.  We woke up after a bit of a sleep in to find that it was absolutely pouring rain.  And not just Vancouver rain.  The walk from the door of the hotel, literally around the corner to the hotel’s restaurant resulted in Pa’s rain jacket getting soaked through.  Not even a 2 minute walk.  Add to that a ton of wind.  We decided that rather than walk into town in the rain, get soaked, be wet and miserable and have to hope that our clothes dry out before we have to pack up tomorrow to head to the next town was unappealing and hung out in our hotel room, watched TV, read, talked about books.

We did head down to the hotel restaurant for a late lunch as the innkeeper had made the Bulgarian version of moussaka and I was eager to try it, and Pa was too, and it was everything I hoped it would be – meat and potatoes, baked into a comforting casserole.  Our sweet innkeeper, with whom we communicate through his broken English, my broken Russian and Ma’s broken German gave us a handful of shells from the beach as a souvenir from the Black Sea and advised that he was closing up shop for the season on Saturday and heading back to Vienna for the winter.

We paid our bill and Pa went and got some provisions for the rest of the afternoon/evening, hoping to get some sleep before the journey to our penultimate city for this trip, Plovdiv.