When cycle route signage is good, it's a lot of fun; kind of like a scavenger hunt. When it's bad, it's just painful. You end up on random roads or backtracking, which has often been our case in Hungary. We started off the morning cycling by Esztergom's enormous basilica, which is the largest building in Hungary.
Poor signage of the Eurovelo 6 route soon put us on a corner, decidedly lost. Fortunately, Hungarian helpfulness came to our aid as three different people tried to put us back on track. One even regaled us with a Hungarian history lesson: "Hungary used to have an empire and access to two oceans, now we just have a third of that territory and Lake Balaton is our ocean!" Amusing but kind of depressing.
Turned out we had to ride on a fast road with no shoulder and bad pavement to get to the next section of the path. By the time we had the chance to cross into Slovakia we took it, we were fed up with Hungarian bike paths. Slovakia also lacked proper route signage but made up for it with big, freshly painted cycle paths on smooth asphalt. We ended up covering about twice as much distance per hour in Slovakia than in Hungary. Just as our bottoms were getting sore, we spotted a "Zimmer frei" sign in an elderly couples yard. They fixed us our first Slovak cuisine and even gave us a try of their homemade "schnapps" which burned like firewater.
No comments:
Post a Comment