Trip Stats and Trivia

A few posts below I uploaded a rough map of our route. Thought I'd share some other stats and things... (Dad, this one was inspired by you.)

1) Mileage

• Current trip total: 1300 km (Prague - Ljubljana).
• Daily averages: 50 km at the beginning, 60 - 70 midway, 70 - 90 currently.
• Record day: 95 km in the foothills in Slovenia. World of pain.

2) Elevation: Allan's SuperWatch tracks our altitude and spits out the total number of metres climbed and dropped over the day.

• In Czech: between 600 and 1000 m climbed (and then descended) daily. The Aussies said the rolling hills of Czech were harder than the passes through the Alps. Weird.
• In Hungary: negligible.
• In Slovenia: less climbing overall than Czech, but steeper at times (anything over 12% grade, I walk).

3) Temperature: The SuperWatch also reads out the temperature. Handy when you want to curse the skies and feel justified.

• Czech: 25 - 32. Liveable.
• Austria: 28 - 32. Bearable.
• Hungary: 30+ every day. Alyssa melts.
• Slovenia: 18 - 32. Alyssa develops bipolar.

4) Campsites

• Good: Quiet fields. Clean bathrooms. Anything with swimming. Or ice cream. Hot springs. People who cook us goulash. Anything under $5 per person.
  
• Bad: Hot springs gone crazy. Sometimes, they take this thermal bath thing a little far and you can't find a campground WITHOUT hot springs attached. Then they go and turn the area into some twisted kind of amusement park with waterslides, brightly painted toot toot trains, and scary people walking around in white robes like some spa cult.
  
• Ugly: Campground/Motel outside Gyor, Hungary. Stale smoke pervaded everything, even open air field sites; mould and dirt filled every crack and broken tile of the bathroom; the 'kitchen' sink drained onto the floor of the men's bathroom; and the showers looked like the kind of place a killer would take their next victim in some cross between American Psycho and Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Tom and I got the heebie-jeebies just brushing our teeth.
  
• Stolen: Some of the best camping yet. Farmer's field in Czech; public forest in Austria; campground in Hungary with no way to pay on a Sunday; mountain river valley in Slovenia.
  

5) Local crops identified and sampled:

• Cherries
• Baby corn and corn
  
• Apples (unripe)
• Apricots
• Wheat (surprisingly tasty)
• Grapes (unripe and oh so tangy)

6) Roadkill

• Birds
• Snakes
• Frogs
• Rabbits
• Cats
• One hedgehog

7) Beer prices

• Austria: $4 - 5 served; $0.50 - 2 at the grocery store
  
• Slovenia: $3 - 4 served; less at the grocer's
  
• Hungary: bit cheaper still
  
• And the winner.... Czech: $0.30 - 1.50 served; less at a grocery store. Huzzah!

8) Bike shops

• Sedlcany, Czech - back rack, Tom
• Tabor, Czech - back rack and tire, Annie
  
• Znojmo, Czech - rear derailleur, Allan; headset tightening, Annie
• Bratislava, Slovakia - rear wheel, cassette and derailleur, Alyssa; drivetrain, Tom
  
• Szombathely, Hungary - bottom brackets, Alyssa and Allan
• Ljubljana, Slovenia - headset, Annie
• All = excellent
  

9) Weight

• Panniers: 40 - 50 lbs.
• Water: 3 - 4 L each.
• Food: Enough for 1 - 2 days at a time.
• Bread: 1.5 - 2 kg consumed per day as a group.

10) Sleep

• Average bed time: 10:00 - 10:30
• Average rise time: 7:30 - 8:00 (boys); 8:00 - 9:00 (ladies)
• That makes the average sleep... 9 - 11 hours. Mmm.

11) Overall Country Comparison:

• Czech: oldest feel, best towns, best castles.
• Austria: best windmills, most vineyards, best gelato.
• Slovakia (only spent one day, but): nice capita city, most expensive Coca Cola.
• Hungary: flattest, hottest, best tailwinds, best headwinds, best hot paprika.
• Slovenia: best scenery, most mountainous, most bike-friendly capital.
  

I love my life

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Originally uploaded by Em Darling

Typical Greenways trail, Czech

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Originally uploaded by Em Darling

Taking a stroll through a Czech town

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Originally uploaded by Em Darling

Prague castle cathedral

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Originally uploaded by Em Darling

Look closely, I'm pretending to be interested in a $50 concert. (Later we stumbled across a Klezmer concert for free. Hiya!)

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Originally uploaded by Em Darling

Prague by day

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Originally uploaded by Em Darling

Prague by night

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Originally uploaded by Em Darling

Just chilling at a castle in Czech...

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Originally uploaded by Em Darling

Route Map

Headwinds in Hungary

This is a very spontaneous trip.  We really had no more than vague plans for where we were going to go after Czech, other than that we wanted to stay in Eastern Europe and end somewhere in Croatia.   So after Vienna we decided to head east to Slovakia and Hungary, more to avoid the expensive Euro prices in Austria than anything else.  (Ed. note:  we are currently in Slovenia, which to our disappointment is also on the Euro.  Blast.  Guess we should have read the guidebook instead of just carting it around like deadweight.)  We'd kind of hoped to head all the way to Budapest before turning south, but our plans were thwarted by lack of time.  We did manage to roll into Hungary in good time on amazing tailwinds that had us cruising at 35 km/h, but turning southwest was a bit of a different story.  Hungary is amazingly flat (at least the part we saw), amazingly hot (it may or may not have been a heat wave; we couldn't quite get the story straight), and amazingly windy... in the wrong direction if you're headed west.  Three days of fighting headwinds in tight peleton styles (pack-riding) was enough for us.  We are now in the hills of Slovenia and gloriously happy.  It even rained for a whole day!  (Only the second day of rain in 3 weeks, crazy.)  I was cold for the first time in as long as I can remember!!  So happy!

Hungary, according to the first sentence in our guidebook, is "more than goulash, wine, and thermal baths."  Goulash!  Wine!  And thermal spas?  What the?!  We definitely hadn't heard about these...  And so our mission began.  Our three days in Hungary were spent drinking wine, sitting in hot mineral baths (actually part of our campsite!  - now that's convenient), and searching for goulash.   This proved trickier than expected, especially since we've become quite accustomed to our nightly meal of veggie pasta and can't quite break the ritual or fork over the money for a restaurant meal.   We decided our last day in Hungary had to be Goulash Day.  We had it all planned out - spend lunchtime in town, find a nice little restaurant, bust out the wallets, and pick one of the surely multiple goulashes on the menu.  No dice.  We instead spent all our time and energy getting new bottom brackets for Allan's and my bikes, and rolled out of town without goulash.  That night our luck turned even worse when we arrived at the campsite marked on our map, only to find out that it was a youth camp and had no camping.  But then, get this...  the owner came out, spoke perfect English, offered us the forest as a secluded campground, and said (no joke), "Um, would you care for a dinner of Hungarian goulash?"  Success!  We had a tasty soupy goulash, hot Hungarian paprika, and a bottle of white wine on the house.  We even had a game of basketball with the teenagers before bed.  Hungary... not so shabby.

Bike trouble in Bratislava

It's finally happened - we had to spend a day giving our bikes some loving (so they'll cooperate and take us into the mountains of Slovenia). I popped a rear spoke a day before arriving in Vienna, and since we spent 3 days being city tourists and neglecting bike work, my bike retaliated by popping another spoke and refusing to be trued by Tom's sweet bike mechanic skills. Luckily we found an awesome bike shop in Bratislava today - one of those little family joints full of friendliness and random bike parts. 6 hours and much sign language later, we realized my rear wheel and drivetrain had to go, as did Tom's cogs and chain. We are now fully set up and ready to go with new components and tuned up bikes - something my bike probably hasn't seen since it was born 26 years ago. It's an ancient piece of work, but lovable. A group of fancy-pants rich Slovakian doctors passed by the bike shop today and laughed at my bike for a good 10 minutes, but that only makes me love it more. My favourite line from the encounter: "How long have you been in Bratislava? Have you seen our museum yet? Maybe you should visit and see if they would like to buy your bicycle. Hahaha! Hahahaha!" [entire group joins in.] So sassy, these Slovaks. Ah, I love my bike!

More from Vienna

To clarify yesterday's post, no, we didn't get tickets to the Euro Cup finals (but we did watch it on a giant screen in the heart of the city with mobs of crazy fans everywhere. Ridiculous!). In fact, we didn't even know when the match was until we tried to book a hostel the day before. Good luck with that. Hence the crazy scheme of sleeping in the bushes. But hey, it worked! Our panniers are safely stowed in a locker at a train station and today we are off to explore the non-soccer side of Vienna (hello, Mozart...), and try to find ourselves a hostel for tonight before we start smelling like hobos.

euro 2008, holy crap

I am on some strange kind of free internet at McDonalds in Vienna and just watched Espana win the Euro Cup. Craziness. Now we just have to ride 10 km out of town to camp on the side of the bike trail. Vienna = so worth it.

Prague and the Czech countryside

First post from the road! After a couple days in Prague (exploring the Old Town and New Town - only slightly newer than the Old Town, dated at hundreds of years old instead of a thousand-ish), we put our bikes together and packed up our gear on a grassy shore of the Vltava river. After a couple hours´ delay, we hit the road by 5 pm Tuesday. Par for the course, when it comes to Annie and me on trip. Huzzah! Off to a good start! We even managed to navigate out of Prague by dark and found a sweet spot for a campsite in a farmer´s hayfield. Tick-free? Possibly not, but no one has tick-borne encephalitis yet. Huzzah again!

The Czech countryside is ridiculously beautiful. If you ever want to bike in Europe, come to Czech. The Greenways are a huge series of roads and trails linking Prague to Vienna through rolling hills, small villages, a few bigger towns, and farms dotted throughout. The roads themselves are awesome pavement (with only a few dirt roads linking things up) and the traffic is light and bike-savvy. (Dad, I´ve even been fine without a mirror. More than fine. I´m still looking for one though, like a true safety-conscious Titus.) There are tons of local bikers but we only met our first fellow tourers today. They´re headed to our campsite tonight so we can grill them for info and stories.

One of the things I love about travelling is that every day has at least one high point and one low point, and you appreciate them more than in normal life. Here are some of ours:

Low points

• No one sells white gas. We are therefore stove-less until we find a camping store, and have had to resort to eating at restaurants or making random concoctions of uncooked things like spinach salad with tuna, curry masala, raisins, Balkan cheese and sunflower seeds. (That one was actually pretty good for the first few bites.) Nutella and stale bread also go a long way.
• We suck at speaking Czech. Luckily we´ve been getting by with sign language and our limited vocab of 'hello', 'sorry', 'please', 'thank you', 'beer', and 'where is a bike shop?'
• Today is bloody hot. Sorry, I know the weather hasn´t been great in Canada, but 32 degrees and sunny is too smoking hot to bike in right now. Maybe Tom and I WON´T head to Turkey in August, hmm? Tomorrow some thunderstorms are supposed to roll in so maybe that´ll cool things off again. Until today the weather´s been absolutely perfect.

Highlights

• We found a random festival in random town for the solstice! We rolled in at dinner, hungry and tired and unable to find a campsite. Instead, we found a massive party in the main square with live music, food stalls, and people everywhere. Klobasa for dinner, nougat for dessert, and beers for the evening and everyone was much happier. We even saw crazy fireworks from our hotel room window that night!
• Everyone here is super helpful. We had several people help us find our way out of Prague. One mountain biker dude even went out of his way to lead us to the suburbs before turning around and heading back downtown to go home. Servers and hostel staff are really friendly and some speak decent English so we feel less like tools. Plus, everyone says 'please' a million times per sentence. 'Prosim' means everything from 'What can I get you' to 'You´re welcome.'
• Beer just keeps getting cheaper.
• We found cherry trees on the side of the road! I think Annie topped her max speed to come tell us what we´d all just ridden by. We spent an hour up a tree and then feasted.
• Did I mention Czech is stunningly beautiful??

More to come, including photos. Internet is tricksy to find though, so I´ll do my best.

Back on the blogging wagon

Hello Blogspot, so nice to see you again. Didn't think I was going to blog this trip, but I hate spamming people's inboxes so here we go. However, the thing I DO love about mass emails are all the responses you get back from people, so please please please drop me a line or comment at the bottom of these posts and I will stay in touch.

First stop of the trip = London to see Pam! (and to see London - never been here before. Nope, I did not fly through London on the way to Delhi a few years back; I flew Russian Aeroflot through Moscow. Oh Aeroflot.) London is fantastic. Exploring London with Pam is even better. Here is a taste of what we've been up to...

- Tube rides and city wandering (my bike is sadly still boxed up, waiting to fly to Prague, so for now everything's by foot and Tube)
- Shopping (from discount store Primark, to window shopping on Regent St, to exploring Camden Market, to costume stores near Piccadilly Circus. And no, Piccadilly Circus is not, like I had expected, a circus. Yep, I'm naive.)
- Pints at many an English pub
- Awesome live music - Laura Marling (an 18-year-old prodigy, think Joni Mitchell meets Feist); then a wicked blues bar in Soho
- High school reunions - so many NTers in London! Hooray!
- Stroll on Hamstead Heath
- Afternoon at Hampton Court Palace - so many fancy rooms... so many fancy tapestries... head spinning....
- Tate Modern gallery
- "Fancy Dress" Party at Laura's! (AKA costume party) Theme was "anything that starts with P" so we went as Pippi Longstocking and a Pinata, i.e. "wear a crazy sombrero and throw candy at people when they hit you with a stick." Much ridiculousness.

Enjoy the photos! I'm loving this blogging thing again.