europeblog

Fine weather today, but cool. Ended up in the town of Mozart’s birth, but am still wondering about his connection to fairly ordinary tasting balls of chocolate.

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Went soft, succumbed to the weather, chose luxury instead of nature. Viewed the longest castle in the universe.

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Saw and heard the biggest organ in the universe, donned beanie instead of helmet, ended up in Hitler’s birthplace.

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After squandering two days of hot sunny weather in smokey Linz net cafes, the rain started as soon as I was back on the road.

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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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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