We love to share what we've been up to but we have obviously completely failed on keeping things up to date. From Sighisoara, Romania we took a train to Budapest, Hungary. We absolutely loved it there and had a hard time leaving. There was much talk about how we could settle down and live there for awhile. We walked around, a lot. We rode around, a lot. We relaxed in the hot water of several large pools at the public thermal baths. Did I mention we loved it there?
Then it was time for the open road again. We set our sights on Vienna as the next large city to stay in. Two nights in our tent at different campgrounds, two days of riding 70+ kilometers, and one very-long day of 130 kilometers got us there. We had considered staying in Bratislava about 60 km sooner but decided we should push through. I'll give more details in a later post but let's just say we didn't like Vienna really all that much. It's very beautiful but it lacked the magic of Budapest. Then there's the additional problem of everything costing about twice as much here as any of the places we had been in the last month or so. That's was a hard pill to swallow and we decided to get out of town sooner rather than later.
Three more days of riding and two more campsites got us to Brno, Czech Republic. We were unable to find anywhere to stay close to the city center so we decided to ride north about 15km to a reservoir where there were some campgrounds. We didn't have much in the way of maps and were close to being lost as the sun started going down. At the last minute we found a room at a pension where through some charades we were able to get a room for the night. It was very nice and relaxing after the long day and we were excited to have a washing machine in the room.
The next day we got our bearings and found our way to a campground that had eluded us the night before. We checked into a little cabin for the occasion of my birthday. Then we rushed to grab a transit bus back into Brno to see the sights. This is another one of those places with a beautiful and very old city center that is mostly without cars. It's always so nice to be able to walk around and experience a place without having to constantly worry about being run down. Photos soon for here too.
From Brno we took two-hour train to Prague to stay with a close friend's parents, Jitka and Petr. We took a metro train from the main train station (Hlavni Nadrazi) and they met us at the end station with their bikes. We rode with them through a very beautiful park and on some tiny dirt trails up and down some steep hills. They were the most-gracious hosts who gave us a room to sleep in and kept us fed for more than a week. This also gave us a base of operations for our exploration of Prague. More on this soon too.
I mentioned in the title of this post that we are now in Berlin. In fact we have been here almost two weeks. We've been hanging out a lot in Berlin with a friend from San Francisco and his wife who are living here for a couple years. Wow, how did we get so behind on this blog? I'll try to post more details soon on all those cities from above. And I suppose I should also mention the many days of riding that took us from the Czech Republic to Dresden and then finally to Berlin. ;)
From Berlin we will be taking a train to Frankfurt for a night. Then we will ride southwest into France to watch a stage of the Tour de France on July 6th. Then it's more riding to get to Paris, then through Belgium to the Netherlands. Then a ferry to the UK for our last month of this amazing trip.
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| Oh Berlin, how we love you. |
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