15 May 2007

Almasneszmely to Bakonyszentkiraly
Today started out warm and sunny as we started riding towards Tata, going away from the Duna on an alternate route that was a little quieter than the road the campground was on. The route had some rolling hills but this was a nice change from the first two days of riding which were mostly flat. At one point we stopped at a very small building that we thought looked like a bakery, but to our dismay it was a meat shop. We really need to learn the Hungarian word for bakery!
Trying to navigate around Tata proved challenging. We found a tourist info center and the woman there gave us a great map of Hungary showing all of the bike routes. We wished we would have had it before we started.
We backtracked to a bakery we saw on the way in, enjoyed a couple of pastries and then went back through the roundabout we passed through on the way in, hoping that we were getting on the road that the info center lady told us to take. There were no street signs anywhere, but eventually we saw some directional signs pointing to the different towns and found the one we were looking for.
The road went through a large agricultural area with fields of corn and wheat as far as the eye could see. It had some gently rolling hills and we thoroughly enjoyed the terrain and the sunny, warm breezy weather.
We stopped in Nagyigmand and bought some food at a grocery store for lunch. We had the liver patte that Csaba's mom sent along with us and have decided that this is something we should carry because it's tasty and it's sold in 1.5 inch wide round sealed containers that don't need refrigeration. As we ate on a bench in front of a fountain, we gave our new map a good look. John saw a big lake to the south, Lake Balaton, and just threw out the idea of going that way instead of our original plan of following the Duna (Danube River) to Bratislava, Slovakia. A lake sounded much more appealing than another big city, so we started looking at routes and places to go from there and decided to go for it. Straying from an established bike route is a pretty radical move for us, but we figured "what's the worst that can happen?".
So we backtracked about 500 meters to head in our new direction and hit the road.
As we were rolling along we noticed the clouds starting to thicken up. There were some high clouds off in the distance this morning, but we never seemed to catch up to them. We had an aggressive plan of covering about 90 kilometers today to get to Zirc where the next campground was. This mileage was a big jump from the first 2 days. We figured if we got too tired we could stop off in one of the small towns along the way and get a zimmer (a room for rent in someone's house - similar to a bed and breakfast).
Soon the clouds started darkening and the wind picked up. At first there were just a few sprinkles. We only had 16 kilometers to go when the rain came pouring down.
We put on our rain jackets, rode another couple of kms and decided to head into Bakonyszentkiraly to find a zimmer. We stopped to ask a lady who was walking, but she just mumbled something in Hungarian and kept walking. Next we stopped at the post office where a lady sort of tried to help us. She spoke no English and kept saying Egan and pointed up the road. We thought she meant that the next zimmer was not unti the town of Egan, but when we looked on the map we couldn't see any town anywhere with that name. Frustrated we decided to go on to our original destination another 14 kms in the pouring rain.
In about 50 meters we saw a sign that looked like it was pointing to an apartment for rent. We went down that street and found the house. The house owners looked a little surprise and unprepared for guests but were very accomodating. They had us put our bikes under cover on the porch in front of the room. Then they made the bed, brought towels, chopped some wood! to stoke up the ceramic chimney in the room that acts like a radiator and got us a drying rack for our clothes. They showed us where all the dishes were in the kitchen and how to operate the gas range. And all of this was done without any English spoken. Rose and Johann Egan (that's what the lady at the post office meant) were great hosts. Johann brought us a plastic Sprite bottle full of palinka, a Hungarian alcohol that we think he made himself. We told him we didn't want the whole bottle, so he poured us all a shot, we clanked glasses for a toast and threw the liquor back. It was very strong, taking our!
breath away for a second. But we're glad we tried it because it seemed to make our hosts happy.
Next came the act of paying. We asked them to write down the price which was 7000 forints. We knew we were going to have a challenge here because we weren't able to find any ATMs on our new, unplanned route and we only had 4700 forints. We asked if they would take U.S. dollars, worked out an exchange rate and paid. Done deal!
The rain ended at about 7:00 but it was still very overcast and misty. We could not see the castle remains on the hill above the house anymore. We made the instant noodles that we've been carrying since day one but could never make because we haven't been able to use our new stove yet.

Kms 75
Time 4:40:00
Avg 16.3
Max 37.7