tim and piper an der donau, wanderlost in Hungary and other stories...

biking the Danube is for old people, and pipe and tim realized that as soon as they stepped rubber to pavement. but we weren't complaining. bike shops, ice cream shops, bars, restaurants, campgrounds...all on the bike trail. it was like a bike super highway and pipe and timo were in hi gear dingin our bells gettin granny to pull to one side so that we could steam past like a mad truck driver, trailer and all. you felt as is you just biked along a river, saw nothing but the river and some fields and then a camp ground appeared and you camped. kinda surreal. the bike trail avoids the center of towns, probably because of the massive amount of people who bike the trail, and there for you lose any sense of where you are and why your biking. we need towns!! we need to see locals doing their thing. we need to see chickens running across the street...we need architecture!!! all we got was the back side of all the slow bikers...oh well, now we know. also, everytown in the area is some name followed by "an der donau". like no one knew that these towns were on the Danube?? any way we had lunch an der danau. and pitched the tent an der donau and we even crashed into each other and fell down an der donau. it was good times an der donau. drank a beer an der donau in a tiny pub in the middle of nowhere an der donau, like a field an der donau , and there was this massive power plant behind it an der donau. and im talking stones throw behind it an der donau. but the powerplant an der danau wasn't spewing any funk or making any noise...it was dead quiet an der donau . eerie. when we left a guy informed us that the plant was meant to be nuclear but greanpeace stopped it and they never finished building it an der donau...huh. kinda cool, i'll drink a beer ( organic i hope ) to green peace!! ( an der donau )

passing into slovakia and Hungary an der donau was a bit of a mess. as soon as you pass into these countries the bike signs stop pointing you in the right direction and finding the right way is near impossible. i even managed to pass into Slovakia on a bike trail only to be stopped by a gate, so i turned around for Austria to figure things out and there was an irate border guard asking me for my passport and why i was in this forbidden area!!! " NO BIKING" he is teling me. "but this is a bike trail..." i though, go figure. many times while in Hungary the Danube trail would spit you out on some back road with no signs of where to go and a big sign that indicated "no biking". why the hell would there be a no biking sign on a bike trail??!! any way, i found my way to Budapest and here i am. tomorrow i leave for lake balaton and eventually into Slovenia...

one thing that pipes and timers got into was doing nite rides around sweet towns. we did athens, rhodos, nesebar bulg, chesky krumlov czech...and so in the past few days ive racked em up...a nite ride in bratislava slovakia ( where i got horribly lost...another story ) , the donau island (an der donau? ) -that was sweet, 20 miles from the heart of the city and a tiny quiet island with sand roads and people having camp fires and the moon was full and all the tourists left to go back to work...mmmmm:) and finally budapest. nite rides are the best, you get to see a lot of the cityand all te cool stuff is lit up...

talky soon!!
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