A Hard Days Night: Day 46 - Budapest to Dunafoldvar - Get It While It Lasts... A Big Loop Through Europe 2017

September 22, 2017

A Hard Days Night: Day 46 - Budapest to Dunafoldvar

A little tough getting going this morning ... and not because of the wine tasting last night!

It was great to have few relaxing days off the bikes and better to be able to visit with old friends as well. Even though it wasn't raining, it was cool and damp in the morning, adding to the inertia.

However, we did eventually get ourselves packed up and threw our legs over the bar at just past nine.

We're riding without a net now. About 400 m south of Abhi's place, the red line demarcating the EV6 route on my Pocket Earth map ended. It comes back for a while in Serbia, but from here on in we will be relying on the trail marking signs (if and where they exist) and plotting our own routs on the map. It's not tough, but after 3000 km of very well marked routs, both physically and within my GPS, it's a change.

We are also travelling without any camping equipment. This makes us lighter, but it also adds a little more urgency to each day. Although we never did rough camp, we knew that we always could if we had too. Not anymore, we have to make it to a town now and find a hotel or pension.

The riding today was pretty much the same as before, but with incremental deterioration in the overall quality of the route. We had a little bit of everthing today, some excellent paved bike paths, some muddy single track, some potholed rural roads and even some grass overgrown river levees. We also had about 12 km of no-shoulder highway with a reasonable amount of truck traffic,it made us appreciate how spoiled we were over the last six weeks.

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When we got to Dunafodlvar and checked into our rustic pension, we found out that there was a town party going on tonight. When we got to the town centre, there was a good, but rather staid classical group playing to mostly older folks, all of who were attentively sitting and listening. We went and grabbed some dinner (good but nothing special) and when we returned to the party, a Beatles cover band was just getting started up. They were also getting the crowd started up ... they were very good. However it seemded pretty funny to K and me to hear perfect 'english' singing with Hungarian between song banter (imagine Andy Kaufman as Latka giving a spiel between songs) anyway, the band, The Bits, gave us today's song of the day ...

Back In The USSR .... the Beatles covered by The Bits

It's a great song and I thought it was pretty ironic to have a Hungarian band playing this

Some of today's riding ... some of the bike path is getting to be 'make it up as you go along' standard now. What's a few stairs in the middle of bike path?

most of the trail was actually physically well marked today ... it just wasn't demarcated on pocket earth as the EV6

This was some of the trail ... considering the amount of rain in the last 3 days, there weren't too many wet spots

Party night in Dunafoldvar ... The Bits, a pretty good Beatles cover band ... complete with a dry ice smoke machine!

the crowd was of all ages, but the geezers were having more fun!

and since it was basically the town fair, I had to try out their equivalent of the mini doughnuts ... although there is nothing mini about this!

Today's ride: 108 km (67 miles)
Total: 3,121 km (1,938 miles)

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