europeblog

Yeah Linz is small and nice. I have been spending a lot of time holed up in smokey net cafes uploading photos and GPS tracklogs, writing uninspired blog filler, revealing all my passwords to the keyloggers that are surely installed on these trojanned windows computers.

On server side I had a big geeky time and moved the blog from the creaking old donation-supported bur.st to my shiny Linode. Upside is that it’s mine, it’s faster and I can upload every single rubbish photo that I have taken. Downside is that it took about 5 hours in a hot smokey net cafe to get everything working… and I probably could have bought a flikr pro account for how much I spent on the net.

Also I did a little programming in python and made some ugly altitude/distance graphs. More stats coming later.

After spending some time drying out my tent in the morning, I headed over the hill of Wallsee, then over the kraftwerk to the opposite bank of the Donau. Today all the Austrian air force were out. There were planes and helicopters everywhere. During the night a couple of really loud planes boomed overhead. I imagined huge multi-propellor bombers overloaded with tonnes of H-bombs were headed for Russia. I haven’t been keeping up with the news so my suspicion was that due to some political blunder Russia had cut off the gas supply to Western Europe. Europe, no longer with enough gas to cook their käsekrainers, declared war in retaliation.

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Slept in a bit until 8:30, woke in the reasonable hope that the sunny weather at this moment would continue, alas the clouds closed in again, I packed my wet tent and left. A banana on the road for breakfast. Plenty of slugs out today and a few unfortunate ones ended up splattered all over various parts of my bike, which annoyed me a bit.

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Ah weather.

Woke up and it was raining, so naturally, stayed in bed until it stopped. Hit the hypermarket for food, then munched my food and caught up the last 4 days’ entries in my Tagenbuch. By 12:03 I was ready to leave. All the other cycle tourers at camping had left. The weather was OK but cloudy.

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Woke up to the heat at 7:30 feeling pretty tired. Packed up very neatly and left. No breakfast this morning because I didn’t go shopping the night before, because of the free parade. There are 3 good ways to cycle out of Vienna: on the bank of the Alte Donau, on the bank of the Neue Donou, or along the Donau isle.

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Now here is something special. After emerging from the internet cafe, I thought I would go out and finish off sight-seeing Vienna. I was just taking some really bad pictures of a historic and artistic looking dome when I heard a really loud noise and trucks going past about 300m away. I had to investigate.

Coming closer, I saw it was a procession of punks and others and about a dozen floats with various types of music and noise coming out at a f/loud volume. So of course I found a beer and joined in.

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Last day in Vienna, at a rather expensive net cafe, because I forget where the cheaper one was, and was sick of the underage WoW addicts in the other cheap one.

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Slightly cloudy morning, first thing was to go to tourist information and get the right map. Rather unmemorable cycling to meet up with the EV-9 route. Lots of rolling hills through the country side and I was feeling a little bit hot. Walked the bike up a not particularly steep hill which was pretty pathetic.

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A roundabout day.

First around the lake and through the forest, past a run-down estate with huge palace, a big gothic St. Hubert statue in a clearing. (put photos here)

Went to the Austrian-Czech border at Valtice, with an awesome Kolonade on top of the hill. Didn’t realize that the other side of Kolonade was Österreich, and so accidentally entered the Prussian empire. Returned and took a rather bad road along the border until Hevlin. Not an interesting town except there was a potraviny there so I could burn my last crowns on lunch.

Then through to the Austrian town of Laa an der Thaya. First mission was to find the campsite. Of course on any map the tent picture means nothing — there was no campsite here. Went into the Rathaus for some maps. It took me a while to find the right room, the rathaus being a bit of a rabbit hole.

Received a quite good map of the area to the east of where I wanted to be. Nonetheless got a large-scale cycle route map with information that there is camping in Poysdorf, and headed there. The cycling signs in Austria are very good. It was no problem getting there, apart from the warm weather, the somewhat uninteresting farm land, and running out of water.

Followed a route called the Veltliner. I have no idea what that means but it goes around a hilly region, takes you up the side a bit so you can get a little view and see some grape vines, then drops you back down into Poysdorf.

I was the only one in a tent at the camping, until a Polish couple arrived on their bikes, Lukasz and Ola. They had caught the train from Katowice at 3AM to Brno and then cycled from there. Nice guys. Though weary, they offered to share their soup and still had time for a chat.

Dep 9:30, arr 5:00, dst 97.5km

No GPS track log today. The GPS was still stuck on the compass screen and the battery was slowly running flat. This was quite depressing for me, I’m not sure why.

Cloudy weather in the morning so I was sluggish getting away. I even considered not going anywhere this day but then I realized I would have to stay in Hustopece.

Lots of vine yards in this region, as well as the usual corn, wheat, sunflowers, poppies. I wish I could get my photos up, it’s just a challenge to find a decent cheap internet cafe to do this from.

Went to Breclav and had a look at the campsite. It was rubbish so I had a look around the town and went shopping. The town was quite nice — a river, big old palace type buildings, nice cycle lanes inside the town. At the shop I bought some Czech delicasies to bring to Austria as gifts — A bottle of Kofola, a big bar of Studentska chocolate, and some obscure beer.

Went back to Lednica and found a minicamping there in a vineyard, next to the lake. Relaxed there for the afternoon as it was quite hot. The owners of the vineyard were shaking overripe cherries out of the cherry trees — perhaps for wine or jam I don’t know. A thunderstorm passed by in the evening but only a little rain. Drank the Kofola and ate the Studentska by accident.

Dep 10:30, arr 3:15, dst 52km.