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Monday, 05 January 2009
  
Home arrow Cycle Tours & Events arrow Slovakia 2000 arrow 8 August
Day 11: 8 August, 2000 PDF Print E-mail
Destination:     Mönchhof, Austria 
Daily Cycle Distance:     107.0 km. (66.5 mi.)

We got an early start from Györ (7:45AM). Our goal today was to get across the Hungarian border and back into Austria where we felt confident that we could find a gasthaus for the night. We were able to pick up a nice paved bike trail just outside of town. It paralleled the highway until we got to Hédervár(24km).

HalssziHorseAndWagon.jpg (112929 bytes)

From Hédervár the bike route (and us too) stayed on a secondary road until we reached Mosonmagyaróvar (Pop. 30,000). Just before we got into Mosonmagyaróvar, we passed through the small village of Halaszi.  I was able to capture the anachronism of the little village with this photo.

We got into Mosonmagyaróvar at 10AM. While trying to find our way out of Mosonmagyaróvar, we stumbled on some sort of town celebration. (Complete with band and'high school' pompom girls.) in the center of town. The street was packed with people and we needed to retrace our route to get around the center of town. It took another hour to reach the Northern edge of this little city. The main border check point was on HU1 which is a major truck route into and out of Hungary. Just outside of Mosonmagyaróvar there was a sign banning bikes and other slow moving vehicles from HU1. There must have been an alternate bike route to the border crossing but this was not evident from the cycling route maps that we had. We were also not to keen to use this border crossing because there were no good bicycle alternatives to the truck route once we reached Austria. Out of the four maps that we had of this area, one of them showed another border crossing off to the west at Albert Kazmér-puszta. What we first thought was the road to Mosonszolnok, turned out to be a rough gravel road that went past the fragrant town dump.  After two weeks of smelling pig manure, we hardly noticed the dump.  Correcting our route, we eventually reached Mosonszolnok.  Beginning at  Mosonszolnok, the road to Albert Kazmér-puszta and the border got progressively narrower and rougher until it was a barely passable single lane road. Some 20+ km. from Mosonmagyaróvar when we finally reached the border, there were no Hungarian guards, a locked border gate and 2 Austrian soldiers on the other side with automatic rifles.  A nice smooth Austrian two lane road beckoned us from the other side.  At this point we were less than 6 km. from Mönchhof. 

From the grinning Austrian soldiers, we got general directions to the next crossing point south - Jánossomorja/Andau, some 20+km away from the direction that we wanted to take. This one turned out to be a pedestrian only crossing for cars were parked on lots on either side of the border. We got through with our unusual bikes and chit-chatted with both the Hungarian and Austrian border control. I kinda guess that we spiced up their otherwise dull day at this sleepy little checkpoint.

Andau was made notable in James Michner's 1958 book on the Hungarian revolution 'A Bridge at Andau'. For Becky's mom, I took a couple of photos at the town of Andau since she's the one that gave me the Michner book to read.

Andau.jpg (83096 bytes) AndauBob.jpg (142204 bytes)

By this time it was close to 1:30PM and our last meal was breakfast around 7:00AM.  So, lunch was at the first restaurant we could find on the Austrian side of the border in Andau. After another 17km and we found Gasthof Koch @ 560ATS ($45) in Mönchhof.  This day, we rode for 7˝ hours (5 hours actual riding time) and completed just over a metric century at 107km. This is the longest single day distance of the trip. Supper was plain but good food at Gasthof Koch.

Frau_Koch.jpg (102738 bytes)
Frau Koch in front of her Gasthaus in Mönchhof

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