Day -1, Thursday, July 27th:

Kathy drove me to Dulles Airport to meet the late afternoon Austrian Airlines flight to Vienna. I, the frequent international traveler, was nervous as a cat, for this trip was going to be quite different than any I had taken before. I normally travel quite lightly, but this trip would be different, for with me was a large box containing most of my disassembled Lightning P-38 recumbent bicycle as well as an overstuffed GI duffle containing the rest of the bike plus two packed bike panniers.

I was about to depart on my first-ever bike tour. I, the long-time bike commuter and recreational rider, always figured that my first tour would be a fully sagged affair to some tame locale in the USA or to one of the familiar to Americans tourist meccas of Western Europe. Instead, I was about to depart on a fully self-planned and self-supported tour to areas in Central Europe that I’ve never seen appear on any bike tour itinerary: from Austria into the Slovak Republic and Hungary.

The whole idea hatched the head of long-time caver-friend Cletus Lee almost 10-years ago. About a year ago, he recruited me and we had an email correspondence going and gradually he convinced me that this would be a cool thing to do. I am so glad he did. Why Central Europe? Cletus hoped to find an area to bike tour that was not yet spoiled by tourists and MacDonalds and yet was civilized enough to have paved roads and frequent hotels, guest-houses or pensions. He was correct on that account.

Kathy and I parked in one of the massive Dulles lots and she helped me wrestle my outlandish luggage onto the shuttle bus and then into the terminal for check-in with Austrian Airlines. At check-in I got my first of many pleasant surprises of the trip: Austrian accepted all my oversized luggage with no extra charge. Kathy then accompanied me to the gate where we found Cletus waiting after his connecting flight from Houston, Texas.

Day 0, Friday, July 28th:

We arrived at the Wien Flughof at something like 9 am their time, really more like midnight to 1 am in the time zone we were used to, after our overnight flight. We got through immigration in the usual European style: a quick glance at our passports and our faces followed by a stamp in the passport along with a friendly greeting, and proceeded to the luggage conveyor hoping to find that everything had arrived okay. The duffles soon appeared and we were directed to another area to look for the boxed bikes since they wouldn’t fit on the conveyor. And there we found the two boxes standing there patiently waiting for us.

We dragged everything to the main lobby to look for some sort of transportation that was willing to carry us and our stuff to nearby Fischamend where Cletus had reserved us a room at a hotel called the Stop & Sleep. As big as the box containing my Lightning was, the box that Cletus had his RANS Stratus in was even bigger. It was, in fact, something like 6 feet long, 2-plus feet high, and nearly a foot thick and weighed something like 80 lbs. It was a box designed to ship a normal tandem bike.

One of the taxi companies said they could carry us in a VW van and so we proceeded outside into a cold rain, disappointing after listening to the pilot of our plane get on the PA periodically during the flight to tell us how beautiful the weather was at Vienna. We got everything into the van by folding the seats and putting the boxes on top of them and then roared down the Autobahn one exit, some 6 km, to Fischamend and to our hotel.

The hotel desk started to sign us in when Cletus reminded them that they had agreed to store our bike boxes for the duration of our stay in Europe. As it turned out, the agreement to store our boxes had come not from the hotel itself, but from a separate reservation agency. The hotel manager, about the only grumpy person we ever ran into during our trip, said that it was impossible to store our boxes to which I replied that the reason we picked his hotel was because they had supposedly told us that we could store our boxes there. Fortunately, the desk clerk was more agreeable and he showed us a non-used conference room and suggested that they could keep the boxes in there.

So, Cletus and I finished our check-in and then proceeded to huddle outside in the rain, somewhat under the protection of a fire escape, and take our bikes out of their boxes and put them together. Everything seemed to go together well; the bikes apparently suffering no ill effects from the trip. Before too long, were beginning to pedal around the parking lot and anticipating pedaling over the European horizon. Unfortunately, it was still raining, so all of our anticipation was a bit dampened. Would this prove to be the weather we would experience during the trip?

Day 1, Saturday, July 29:

It was upon us: the day to lay planning and anticipation aside and put mettle to the pedal and see if two old geezers on funny bikes could really tour self-supported and self-planned into unknown (to us) territory. At least it quit raining during the night, although it was blustery and looked as though the rain could start up again without much provocation.

After the Stop & Sleep’s continental breakfast, coffee and rolls with bread and jelly, we got off to a less than auspicious start. To borrow a term from Jerry Redder, we bumble-dicked big-time just trying to find our way out of Fischamend. We were trying to avoid big roads, and there was a little road we found that looked as thought it headed in a good direction. We took it and soon came across an older gentleman along the way who was out for a walk and tried to ask him if we were on a good road to go towards Bratislava. Unfortunately, Cletus’s German was weak and mine was non-existent, so communication consisted of lots of arm-waving, pointing, and "ja" and "nein." Finally we thought we had everything straight and we took off only to have the guy holler at us a point to a different road.

Eventually, we got out of sight of Fischamend and found ourselves pedalling through rolling farmland and picturesque little towns.
Day 1 took us to Deutsch-Haslau via Arbethal, Göttlesbrunn, Hoflein, Scharndorf. If you look these towns up on a map, you will get some idea of the meaning of "bumble-dicked big-time." At Windungsmaus we hopped on to Highway B-9 toward Hainburg. After introducing ourselves to Austrian traffic, outside of Petronell Carnuntum we judiciously decided to re-route to Prellenkirchen where we stopped for lunch, Approaching 50 km and getting nowhere near the Slovak Border, we decided to search for a place to stay. Back tracking a bit we passed through Schönbrunn and eventually found a room at the Gasthof Hoffman in Deutsch-Haslau.

The proprietress of the gasthof, Frau Hoffman, was quite a loquacious lady who proceeded to give us a Austrian geography lesson, about 90% of it in good Austrian German. We were, it turns out, in the state of Niederösterreich and just a few hundred meters down the road began Bergundland. Not only did she give us a geography lesson, but her accommodations and food were better than what we got at the Stop & Sleep and she charged us barely half.
Total "mileage" for Day 1: 57 kilometers.

Day 2, Sunday, July 30:

We got up to a nice breakfast at Gasthof Hoffman and then loaded the panniers on the bikes to head off. I was alarmed to find that my rear tire was a bit soft, but rather than look for the problem, I squirted some air in and off we went.

On Day 2, we backtracked from Deutsch-Haslau up the road to Prellenkirchen and then went on to Edestal and Berg before crossing the border into Slovakia where we went through Petrzalka, across the Danube from the main part of Bratislava. We then crossed to the Danube and passed through an industrial section of Bratislava, then Motlinovo, Tomasov, Zlate Klasy, Novy Zivot, Jelka, and Sladkovicovo before finishing at Galanta.
The day started off as Day 1 had ended: through mostly rolling farmland. It looked as though most of the crops had already been harvested, but what struck me is that of the crops that were left, one of the main ones was sunflowers; acres and acres, eventually hundreds of acres.

The other notable agricultural activity in the area was vineyards, also covering hundreds of acres, with row upon row of neatly tended vines. And we finally figured out something that we had begun to notice the day before. There were curious looking structures along many of the roads, sometimes individually but more often in groups. They consisted of mounds of earth, usually backed up to hillsides, with concrete walls on the front containing doors in the middle and sometimes with a window on either side. They varied in style, too, with some being very plain and others having some decoration and maybe even a small front yard.
When I saw my first couple, my initial thought is that they were bomb shelters of some sort, but I soon realized that they looked far too cheery for that. And there were cars in front of some of them and so my second thought is that they were some sort of an odd weekend house. Some of them even had groups of people around as if there was a small party going on. And then it hit us -- they were all wine cellars. This whole end of Austria was dotted all over the place with wine cellars. Hundreds and hundreds of wine cellars.

Outside of Berg, we got back on the Austrian B-9 highway that we’d been on the day before to go through the border station into Slovakia. We found a long line of cars and trucks queued up to go through what looked like a tollbooth that said Zollmat Berg" and we didn’t have a clue what to do. But we ran into some other touring cyclists, the first we’d seen on our trip so far, who appeared to be riding up to the front of the line of cars and cutting in so we did the same. We even found that the motorists invited us to do so. One tollbooth with one set of uniforms followed about a 100 meters later by another tollbooth and a different set of uniforms. A glance at the passports at each and we were in Slovakia.

Cletus’s maps showed a bike path that ran along the Danube opposite Bratislava which we found in short order and were able to abandon the busy B-9 highway. We followed the bike path eastwards, viewing downtown Bratislava across the bridges to the north, until the Danube made a turn towards the south. There we found a bike route across the river, attached to the side of a railroad bridge, and we crossed over into an ugly industrial suburb of Bratislava that appeared to be a product of the Soviet era. There were concrete high-rises and waterfront industrial areas that all appeared to have seen better days, if that is even possible. It really appeared as though the area was born ugly.
We worked our way eastward through flat farmland, still with large fields of sunflowers although no more vineyards. We passed through dismal-looking little towns; in one we found what looked like a restaurant complete with customers sitting around drinking and smoking. We tried to buy lunch, but it seems all they sold on Sunday was coke, beer, and cigarettes. And we cycled past what appeared to be abandoned collective farm complexes: walled and fenced compounds looking like prisons, with large agricultural buildings and dormitories with broken windows and with the grounds taken over by weeds.

Our first impressions of Slovakia were not positive ones.
We continued east, eventually getting to Galanta. Cletus pulled out a list of hotels he’d gotten off the internet and we found that one, the City Hotel, had a two-star rating while the others didn’t have any stars at all. So we headed for the City Hotel, a Soviet looking high-rise, and encountered a locked door and the lights out inside. However, there was what appeared to be a doorbell which we pushed and soon a man appeared out of the darkness inside and he opened the door and let us in. We were soon signed in, I think we must have been close to the only guests, and we put our bikes in an unused ballroom.

After my shower, I headed to the bar where I had a bottle of Kelt Beer, 12%, and a small bag of potato chips which cost more than the bottle of beer. And I visited with the desk clerk, as best we could through the language barrier. Most of the conversation as I remember it involved the crash of the Concorde.
Distance for day 2: 84 km. 

As Cletus planned this trip, he roughed out an itinerary that had us going quite a bit further north in the Slovak Republic, into a mountainous area called the High Tatras, and maybe even crossing the border into Poland. At this point in the trip, however, it was becoming apparent that his itinerary was a bit optimistic in terms of territory to be covered.
Much of the early planning had been based on large-scale maps. As the trip got closer and Cletus delved ever further into the world-wide-web looking for information, he started coming up with smaller scale maps and this influenced the trip a great deal. The 1:250,000 maps that he came up with showed roads and towns that didn’t even appear on the 1:600,000 Michelin maps and we found that we preferred the smaller, and less direct, routes that appeared at the higher magnification. We occasionally saw other cycle-tourists using the bigger roads, such as on the B-9 highway that we flirted with briefly, and I expect that they were able to cover more geography, but we decided that wasn’t the way we wanted to go.

Day 3, Monday July 31:

Nitra appeared to be the obvious goal for the day. There was a big road the went directly there, but Cletus’s maps showed a more attractive route through Matúskovo, Diakovce, Sala, Duslo Sala, Mocenok, and Cabaj-Cápor. (There are many more intersting accent marks in these names than I am able to come up with with this gringo keyboard, for example what looks like a small "v" over the "s" in Matúskovo and the "c" in Mocenok.)

My rear tire was low again this morning, so I decided that it was time to put in the new tube I had brought along. I asked the desk clerk to let me out so I could work on the bike outside, but he wouldn’t hear of it. So I pulled my back tire off and changed the tube right there in the hotel lobby, all the while carrying on a conversation with the clerk in a mixture Slowensky, German and English.

On our way out of town, I decided that I needed a few more Karuns, so I popped my ATM card from my local US bank into a machine, they called it a "Bankomat," to see what would happen. When I slid the card into the slot, the screen came up and asked me what language I wanted to use and gave me about five options. I pushed the button next to "Anglische" and was led through a simple process and soon 3000 Karuns popped out. When I backpacked through roughly the same area 20 years prior, I remember carrying wads of travellers checks and having to find open banks. This time I left the States with very little cash. Amazing, the wired world we lived in.

Alas, by the time we were leaving Matúskovo, barely 5 km down the road, my bike was giving me that horrible squishy feeling from the rear and so I stopped and pulled the rear tube out. I guess I must have been distracted by my Slowensky, German and English conversation earlier, for the new tube was pinched royally. So I put in yet another tube, not new, and off we went again towards Diakovce.

Another 5 km, and another flat. This time I put the original tube with the slow leak back in figuring that I could probably get through the day and look for a bike store when we got to Nitra and buy a new tube. The fuuny thing is, I never had to put any air in the tire again, the rest of the trip. Go figure.
We got to Diakovce and bumble-dicked a bit trying to find an old church that the hotel clerk in Galanta had told us about, one of the oldest in Slovakia supposedly. We finally found a church, and while it didn’t appear to be anything significant, we took pictures of it anyway. One more wrong turn, and we were on our way out of Diakovce towards Sala when we came across the real old church, identified by plaques all over the place and a on-going restoration project complete with requests for donations, and so we took more pictures.

Between Mocenok and Nitra, we started to encounter our first real hills in Slovakia. They were fun for me, as I live in a hilly area, but not so much so for flat-lander Cletus.

Soon we were entering Nitra, the largest city we had been in so far this trip. We rode right downtown and found a very nice tourist information center that directed us to a good-sounding hotel, the two-star Olympic, as well as to an internet club so that we could try communicating with the outside world. The information center also sold a nice assortment of maps and Cletus was able to augment is already good assortment.

We checked into the hotel, showered, and headed back downtown. Nitra is quite an attractive little city with an old castle of sorts on a hill in the center. The surrounding area was very nice as well and we were glad to see that the negative impression of Slovakia we had gotten the day before were being cancelled out.
And I went looking for the inner tube I thought I needed. I thought I was very clever having a bike equipped with "European" Presta tubes and was quite surprised to find out that the bike shop in Nitra didn’t even know what they were. They had mountain bikes, tons of them, all with Schrader valves, and their skinny-tired bikes all had a valve that I remembered from my first bike when I was a kid in Brazil and which I thought didn’t even exist anymore. Cletus said he thought the valve was called a "Dunlap" valve. I bought one, it was cheap, hoping that if the need arose, I could get air into it using my Presta pump.
Distance for day 3: 54 km.

Day 4: Tuesday, August 1:
We hit a grocery store on our way out of town to buy some goodies to augment the continental breakfast that the Olympic Hotel fed us and headed east. Again we were on the small roads and going through the small towns that were revealed to us thanks to Cletus’s growing map collection. We went through places with names like Janikovce, Cechynce, Maly Cetin, Pana, Dycka, Vráble, Tehla and Vel’ky Dur, with the destination of Levice.

We stopped to rest at the top of a climb between Maly Cetin and Pana. And old fellow who was working on a piece of farm equipment in his yard came out and visited with us as best we could. He gave us some grapes out of the vinyard next to house and explaned to us that he was not really a Slovakian but was of Hungarian origin. I remembered reading that Hungary lost a large portion of its territory and population when all the borders were redrawn after WW I and I wondered if the gentleman we were talking to was part of that result.

We passed the time there for about half an hour before descending again and coming eventually to Vráble. We went through Vráble without stopping as we were annoyed by the loudspeaker system that was blaring out some sort of message all over town. We wondered why the people put up with it and thought to ourselves that it was something we would have associated with the propagandistic communist era.

By and by we came to Levice and immediately found one of the two hotels Cletus had in mind, the Pension Tilia. It was quite attractive and we checked in without looking any further. Levice was quite a bit smaller than Nitra, but it was quite attractive with the center of town off limits to cars and contributed to our growing positive impression of Slovakia.
Day 4 netted us another 55 km.

Day 5, Wednesday, August 2: 

After Pension Tilia’s wonderful breakfast, the best we’d had on the trip so far and consisting of an incredible variety of fruits, sliced meats, and cheeses, we bumbled a bit on our way out of town. But the bumbling at least enabled us to see more of the castle ruins than we had seen the evening before walking around. And it was with great anticipation that we left Levice, for the day promised to deliver plenty of climbing to our goal of Banská Stiavnica, a mining town dating back to the 12th century and up in the mountains. The road to Podluzany and Nová Dedina was level. From there it climbed steadily, although not obnoxiously so, through Devicany, Pukanec, and Pukanek Mejere. And then the symbols on the map indicating "climb" took on meaning and they day delivered as promised as we climbed to Stiavnica Bane. The motor on Cletus’s bike, used to East Texas geography, protested. And then as the road had climbed, it suddenly descended to our destination of Banská Stiavinca, lower than Stiavnica Bane which we had just come through, yet still higher than our start in Levice by some 500 meters. Normally I love descents, the reward for the effort made in the climb, but not so this time. In keeping with the historical nature of the town, the road was paved with cobblestones, and so it was ride the brakes and endure the whole way into town. Once there, we found an information office and a very helpful fellow who told us that the hotel on Cletus’s list, the Hotel Grand, was 300 meters further down the cobblestones and on the left. At the hotel we found a receptionist and we thought we had pretty good English communications going with her. But then, to Cletus’s question if she saw many Americans in this town, she replied. "No, but many people from the United States come to visit." Distance for Day 5: 48 km. Day 6: Thursday, August 3: Cletus and I had to make a decision. We had 10 days left until our flight home from Vienna. We wanted to have a couple days for Budapest as well as a couple for Vienna and we figured at our rate it would take about four days to cover the distance between the two. We wanted to see more of this part of Slovakia, yet the towns that we wanted to see all seemed to be at least two days away and in the wrong direction; not only that, but getting to them involved riding on roads that were depicted on the map with big red lines instead of the little black lines as we were used to. So we decided to head south, abandoning the mountains after only one day and heading for the Hungarian border. We wanted to spend a bit more time in Banská Stiavinca -- there was a mining museum I wanted to see, albeit back up the steep cobblestone road we had come down the day before and the opposite direction as our exit from town. But the map showed nothing but small, untouristy-looking towns along our route. We tried to find out from the information office if any of the towns had any possibility of lodging, but the fellow didn’t know. All those towns were out of his area. And so we rolled out of town, downhill all the way. As we left I looked back up at our hotel to see the staff all standing out front waving at us on our funny bikes, a picture saved in my mind if not on film. Fortunately, the cobblestones soon disappeared and we glided on down the nice road, our bike computers showing incredible average speeds, at least for a while. Svaty Anton and Pencov blurred past until we reached a main road with European designation E-66 meaning that it was a major international route. We took the E-66 for just a few kilometers to Sebechleby where we were able to get off onto a smaller road again which passed through Rykyncice, Plastovce, and Horné Turovce before reaching Hungarian border at Sahy. Sahy offered our first chance at a hotel, but the one in town was full. Good thing we left Banská Stiavnica when we did. We had our last Slovakian lunch and crossed the border into Hungary. This time we stayed on the same E-66, now also Hungarian Rt. 2, we had avoided earlier. Cletus’s map collection for Hungary was not as extensive as his one for Slovakia and so there weren’t any obvious parallel roads. The traffic wasn’t as heavy as we expected, though, and everyone gave us plenty of room. The only anxiety we had was a few kilometer section where they had fresh paint on the white stripe along the edge of the road, and traffic cones on top of that, which forced us to ride further out in the traffic. After a while we came to Retsag where we found the Hungarian version of a truck stop that had rooms and we called it a day after 84 km. Next: this cyclist has his mettle tested in an unexpected manner.

Day 7, Friday, August 4, Into a Maelstrom: 

We woke up early at our little fogadó, pension, in Retsag. It was the first place we had stayed in yet this trip that didn’t serve breakfast, and neither one of us cared to go far without our morning coffee and so the first order of business was a search mission. Our cruise past the evening before’s ice cream shops only showed us that they were closed, but across the highway we found a bar that was willing to take a break from serving their breakfast beers to fire up their coffee machine. The coffee was good, but the carbos weren’t even, so the next stop was the grocery store’s bakery counter and we were good to go. On down Highway 2 we went towards Budapest, looming some 45 kilometers away. Just after a town called Szendehely we came to an intersection with a smaller road to Veroce and a sign on Rt. 2 which we took to mean "no farm equipment, animal carts, or bicycles past this point." Deciding that life would never be complete unless we visited Veroce, we started on our first detour of the day. At Veroce we picked up a bike path along the Danube. The bike path would be a blessing and a curse the rest of the way into Budapest: a blessing when it was there and curse when it would mysteriously disappear, as it often did, getting us lost and/or abandoning us to soft sand roads. We saw the hydrofoil on it’s six-hour run up the Danube from Budapest to Vienna. We had thoughts of taking it back to Vienna ourselves in a couple days rather than riding the bikes all the way back. They were only thoughts at this point, since we didn’t have reservations. We stopped for more coffee and carbos at a really nice little cafe in a residential area in Vác. And then we continued south on our appearing and disappearing bike path, squeezed between the forbidden Rt. 2 and the Danube. We passed through Szodliget, the three Göds: Felsogöd, Göd, and Alsógöd, and Dunakeszi before arriving at the outskirts of Budapest itself. It felt like we were lost half the time, and with each kilometer closer to Budapest we got, the traffic got thicker. Our first goal in the big city was a tourist information center which an old map of mine showed to be near where an east-west rail line crossed the north-south Rt. 2 on the north edge of the city. We figured that the tourist information center would able to point us to a good hotel and maybe sell a good map of the city and maybe even one that showed bike paths. We got to the area where the rail line crossed Rt. 2 and circled around a bit, but no tourist information center presented itself. Not knowing what else to do, we decided to continue south into the main part of Budapest. This is when things began to get really interesting for this small-town cyclist. It seemed as though there were cars and busses and trucks and trolleys everywhere. I felt like I was in a maelstrom. My serial processor brain was having trouble monitoring road signs, appearing and disappearing bike lanes, and my cycling partner. I never really felt threatened or in danger; Hungarian drivers seemed to be much more competent than their American brethren. But there was *so* much going on. And the closer we got to downtown, the more intense it got. I came on this trip psychologically prepared for carrying more weight than I was used to, up and down hills, though bad weather, and for long days, but not this. I once heard the term "survival skiing" -- for me this was survival bicycling. Meanwhile Cletus, bicycle commuter from Houston, seemed to be enjoying himself in a perverse sort of way. Well, I guess I was, too, although I was maximally stressed. We soon found ourselves on a highway that ran right alongside the Danube. We rounded a bend and there it was in front of us: the Buda Palace on it’s bluff on the other side of the river, the gothic Parliament Building on our side, and connecting the two sides were those incredibly historic suspension bridges. I felt like I was riding my bike through a post card, albeit a card containing cars and busses and trucks and trolleys in addition to the palaces and bridges. But we didn’t seem to be getting any closer to a hotel room. We got off the highway along the river and circled around a neighborhood that my old map showed was full of tourist information centers, but we couldn’t find any of them. We circled several blocks several times looking. My poor brain was saturated and I was becoming useless for making decisions. And then Cletus suddenly stopped, hopped off his bike and removed his helmet. I asked, "What’s going on?" He replied, "This is the Hyatt and I’m going to go in and ask how much a room costs." He came back a few minutes later with an astronomical number. I protested feebly, but Cletus was all enthusiastic about checking in. So that’s exactly what we did. 81 kilometers on one of the most memorable days of my cycling career. 

Day 8, Saturday, August 5:

We decided to take the day off, our first so far, and play tourist. To our dismay, the Hyatt, our most expensive hotel, was the second hotel that didn’t include breakfast in their room price. We hit the streets looking for sustenance, but the area was more of an evening area than a morning one and the only place open was a MacDonalds. We couldn’t bring ourselves to breakfasting in a MacDonalds in Budapest, so we went back to the Hyatt. Good breakfast, but it cost. We spent the day wandering around and feeling a bit out of it not being on our bikes. We came across a sign on a building across a plaza from the Parliament. It was surrounded by a random array of little round markers and said: AZ 1956. OKTOBER 25 -1 VERES CSUTORTOK ALDOZATAIRA EMLEKEZVE A TULELOK The date suggested the 1956 uprising against the Communists, and the random markers suggested possible bullet strikes. If anyone can provide a translation, I’d be most appreciative. 

Day 9, Sunday, August 6: 

We got up early to see if we could get on the hydrofoil. The very nice woman at the check-in said that she knew we couldn’t get on before Tuesday, but that she’d have to go back to the main office, which she was more than willing to do for us, to be sure. Cletus and I talked it over a bit and decided we didn’t want to hang around Budapest for another two days. So we thanked the woman and headed back to the Hyatt to pack up and leave. We crossed the Danube on the Chain Bridge, supposedly the oldest suspension bridge across the river, and passed through a tunnel under the bluffs on the other side. We did some climbs and descents, going through Budakeszi, Páty, and Számbek before stopping for lunch at Szomor. It was nice to be out of the city and onto quiet country roads again. After lunch, we went though Gyermely and over one more climb before quitting for the day at Tarján. As Day 3 had been my tire day, Day 9 became one for Cletus. But because of it we discovered one of those interesting little things about how people in other parts of the world do things you’d never otherwise think about. We pulled into a gas station looking for air, and instead of having long hoses running all over the place to get tangled and run over, the gas stations are equiped with portable little air tanks, complete with short little hoses and nice gages. You carry the tank to where it’s needed and then when you return it to its hangar, it recharges itself. Neat. But unfortunately for cyclists, it only went up to about 70 psi. Distance for day 9: 53 km. 

Day 10, Monday, August 7: 

We left Tarján and went over a hill to arrive at Tata. There we found a bike shop; Cletus was looking for a pump as part of his tire problems from the day before were caused by the fact that his had quit working. The little shop didn’t have a suitable pump, but the shop manager was thrilled as all get out that two Gringos on weird bikes came by to visit. He got out his personal bike to show us, proudly proclaiming that it was "Made in America." After Tata, the hills were behind us. We passed through Kocs, Nagyigmánd, Bálbona, Bana, Bony, and lots of pretty farmland before we called it a day at Gyor. We had a late lunch at a restaurant on a plaza. For the first time on the entire trip, we had trouble with street urchins trying to poke at the bikes. We ended up spending the night in a little pension above the same restaurant, our bikes safely off the street in a little courtyard. 
Distance for day 10: 83 km. 

Day 11, Tuesday, August 8: 

We rolled out of Gyor on some nice roads, with bike trails both on and off the road, through little towns like Gyorujfalu, Gyorzámoly, Gyorandamér, Asványraro, and Hédervar. At Hédervar, we stopped at a little park and I noticed a plaque: The Colorado Beetle. There is a small statue hiding in the lawn to preserve the memory when the first potato beetles were seen in 1947. They were brought from America and they have perished the leaves of the potato. Its popular name is Colorado Beetle, referring to its origin. The small bronze beetle does not express the respect for the parasite, however it refers to the organised plant protection starting at that time. It’s interesting that the plaque was in English. And it also shows that not all the baddies originate elsewhere and then come to North America. The beetle was hardly a "small statue hiding." It was on top of about a two-foot pedestal and the beetle itself was about 2 feet long. We noticed quite a few other touring cyclists along this stretch, something we hadn’t seen often in the places we had been. We found out later that this stretch is part of a pretty will established bike route from Vienna to Budapest. On to Darnószeli, Halaszi, and Mosonmagyaróvár. At the latter place, we made a wrong turn on our way out of town and got a tour of the town dump; all the garbage truck drivers must have really wondered. On to Mosonszolnok and then to Albertkazmérpuszta, fighting a nasty headwind and a bumpy road, one of the worst we’d seen, across about 15 km of flat farmland. At Albertkazmérpuszta we hoped to find a border crossing into Austria. We found the border, but no crossing, Two Austrian soldiers there suggested that we could find one further south along the road between Jánossomorja, Hungary, and Andau, Austria. And so we backtracked through Várbalog to Jánossomorja, adding many extra kilometers to an already long day. But at least we had a tailwind for a bit. At Jánossomorja we turned into the wind once again and found our hoped-for border crossing. It was an interesting one: pedestrians and cyclists were allowed to cross, but not cars. And then we went a couple more kilometers until we got to Andau where we had lunch. It was strange to be back in Austria again -- so "western" compared with Slovakia and Hungary. And now we felt darn near fluent in German by comparison to Slovakian and Hungarian. After lunch, we headed up the road to Halbturn and finally Mönchof where we found our night’s lodging at Gastof Koch. The proprietess, a grandmotherly Frau Koch, was as talkative as can be, all in good German, of course. She told us all about her tour of the United States, some years ago now. 
Distance for Day 11: 107 km. 

Day 12, Wednesday, August 9: 

We got up and had our breakfast and as we loaded the bikes to leave, Frau Koch herself showed up to say farewell. Then it was up the street to a gas station for air, Cletus, and to the grocery store for carbos, me. The carbos, in the form of Danish-type pastry, were still hot. And the gas station was very friendly and gave us each a cup of coffee; a good way to start the day. Not only that, but the gas station had an incredible variety of maps for sale. I bought one detailing the bicycle route from Vienna to Budapest along the Danube, which is how I found out we had been on part of it the day before, and Cletus bought his usual bunches and bunches of maps. Then we took off through Gols, Neusiedl and Winden, around the north end of the Neusiedlsee (saw lots of cars with windsurfers on top). Then over a climb to Wilfeinsdorf and to lunch in Bruck. Next it was to Göttlesbrunn, and from there we backtracked through Arbesthal and Fischamend to the Stop & Sleep Hotel where it had all begun 12 days before. 
Day 12 "mileage": 57 km. 

Day 13, Thursday, August 10: 

The riding wasn’t quite over, however. The Stop & Sleep didn’t have a place for us on Thursday night, although they did on Friday night and Saturday night. So we left in the morning again with two goals in mind: to find a place to stay for Thursday night and then to go on to Baden to look for a bike store Cletus had found on the internet -- the only bike store in Austria that sold recumbents. Baden was about as far south of Vienna as Fischamend was to the east, so we rode an arc around Vienna looking for lodging along the way, preferably one close to a train station so we could go into the city. We found one in Gramatneusiedl, dropped off most of our stuff, and headed to Baden. Cletus knew the name of the place he was looking for in Baden, B.I.E.R Fahrrad Studio (http://www.fahrradstudio.at/), and a vague idea of where it was on the Baden map, and that’s about it. We got a bit discouraged when we got to Baden and of everyone he asked, nobody had even heard of it, even another bike store. But Cletus persevered and after a while we happened onto it on a small street away from the center of town. The owner, Wolfgang, was pleased to see us and our bikes. He had seen a Lightning before, but never a RANS. Also, he had a German HP-Velotechnik "Street Machine" that Cletus was itching to try out. Alas, the bike was too big for Cletus, but I got to try it out. Very strange: a much more laid-back position than I’m used to (although very common in Europe) and underseat steering. It had full suspension and wonderful hydraulic brakes, however. Maybe the next round of mods my bike gets will have to include hydraulic brakes. We must have visited with Wolgang for an hour before we went off to find lunch and then head back to our room in Gramatneusiedl. Once there we showered, and then caught the train for the 15-minute ride into Vienna for supper. 
Day 13 distance: 72 km. 

Day 14, Friday, August 11: 

We got up and breakfasted in Gramatneusiedl and the rode the 20 km or so back to Fischamend. Needless to say, we got to back there *way* to early to check back into the Stop & Sleep, so we killed a few hours just riding leisurely around in the local area. Finally, by early afternoon we checked into the hotel and set about taking the bikes apart and putting them in their boxes for the trip home. After that we walked to the Fischamend Bahnhof, train station, and went into Vienna for the rest of the day. Riding distance: 54 km. Days 14 and 15, Saturday and Sunday, August 12 and 13: We got up and went into Vienna and played tourist as best we could. I’m not sure how Cletus felt, but for me, once the bike was back in its box, the trip was essentially over. I went through the motions as best I could of seeing the sights in one of the world’s top tourist destinations. But I felt like a bit of a spectator, whereas on the bike riding along I had felt more like a participant. It was kind of like going to Mexico just to go to Mexico as opposed to going there to cave or climb mountains. We tried to see the Lipizzaners, but they were gone for the summer. We went to a museum to see some work by an artist named Klimt. Cletus’s wife, Becky, is a fan of the artist, and he wanted to see Klimt’s work for her. And then Cletus showed me what was for me the hightlight of Vienna: the Hundertwasser Haus. It is a bizarre building very remiscent of the work of Gaudi in Barcelona, Spain. Then we got up Sunday and rode the van to the Flughaven. And again Austrian Airlines accepted our bikes without any extra charge. We did have a few moments of anxiety, however. We were sitting on the plane and the cabin crew was starting to go through their safety spiel, yet we could see out the window that our bikes, along with a good bit of other luggage, were still sitting on the carts and not being loaded. The ground crew appeared to be arguing about something and I thought that perhaps the plane was full. But soon they settled whatever it was they were arguing about and finished loading the plane. The flight back to Dulles seemed to drag on forever -- I didn’t envy Cletus having to get off the Austrian flight, get himself and his luggage through customs, and then get on a Continental flight to Houston.

General comments, observations, and whatevers: As with most worthwhile endeavors, I came away from this one with more questions than answers. Motorists in Austria, Slovakia and Hungary are much better than those in the USA, at least from the pespective of this cyclist. Austrian, Slovakian, and Hungarian towns seem to have a handle on controlling sprawl. When the little sign comes along that means "Leaving.... ", the buildings stop. 1:600000 maps didn’t cut it. Cletus’s 1:250000 maps were the way to go. Good way to get stared at short of taking your clothes off: ride a recumbent bike through Central Europe. Fun game to play in Central Europe: Follow along about 50 meters behind a recumbent so you can watch the reactions of people on the street; particularly fun in small towns in Slovakia. By doing it ourselves, we made lots of mistakes, took wrong turns, like trying to cross the border at a non-existent crossing, or touring a town dump. I wouldn’t do it any other way. Would I do it again? You betcha. Thank you, Cletus, for talking me into it.