A fairy tale written on gravel roads of

One fine autumn day, our hero, an avid gravel biker and a lover of sound of stone crunching under his wheels, was led to the vast Karst fields of the Karst and Brkini region, interspersed with endless white roads that promised him a wonderful cycling day, or perhaps a fairytale three days, in the warm autumnal embrace of Slovenian Istria.

Karst and Brkini, that’s the name of the landscape where our hero unloaded his gravel bike. From Ljubljana to Kozina, a train took him, and from here on, the wheels of his gravel bike will be spinning around the world of the Karst. And this is a world marked by stone. A world where water has flowed through porous rocks for millennia, shaping the undulating landscape with its soft touch on surface and creating the breath-taking karst caves beneath it.

Getting to the Karst is easy, but it’s a little harder for our hero to choose the bike route he’s going to take….he was also thinking of using www.map.slovenia-outdoor.com to chart his own route… In the end, because he is a hero and that’s how heroes work, he set off on the Trail of Stone. A trail which will take him in one go through the whole region and to the most beautiful views of the Karst and Brkini, from south to north. If he had come by road bike, he would have chosen the “Road Cycling Eight“, if by mountain bike the “Mountain Bike Eight“, and if he had been in a larger group, he would probably have finished the trip with a different eight (a traditional event on the local farms, that includes lots of wine and food).

The route from the south to the north of the Karst is called the Trail of Stone, and how aptly named. Why? Well, right at the start, after a few warm-up kilometres, near the village of Rodik, there is the mythical Rodik Park. After visiting it, the importance of stone in the soul of the country… from here on, no stone will ever be just a stone…

Our enthusiastic macadam hero will finish the Trail of Stone route at the Peace Monument in Cerje. The lookout peak with its tower, besides being a place of deep reflection, also offers one of the most beautiful views of the Vipava Valley and the Italian plains all the way to the waves of the sea. As the day will more than likely come to an end at this point, the cycling protagonist of this story added a few more kilometres to the route, finishing it at the cyclist-friendly Saksida Estate, accompanied by excellent food and fine wine.