The rain began at about 6:00 A.M. It was light and luckily ended by about 7:30. We packed up under cloudy skies and rode only about 2 kms before stopping at a small grocery store for some breakfast. We had 2 delicious pastries, chocolate milk, bananas, yogurt and strawberries while sitting on the curb.
Just a few quick kms up the road we arrived in Keszthely, a fairly big town. We were looking for hwy. 75 but weren't really sure where to find it. We were following the signs to the towns we wanted to head toward, but then suddenly hit a one-way street, had to turn around and then weren't sure where to go. We headed toward the city center and found the tourist info office hidden in a pedestrian mall. The woman there spoke very little English, but she gave us a map of the town and pointed us in the direction we told her we wanted to go.
Well, hindsight tells us that we must not have been specific enough when we told her where we wanted to go because the direction she sent us was wrong. Eventually, after a bit of a "scene" made by John on the side of the road, he logically figured out which way he thought we should be going, we backtracked about a half a km and found hwy. 75.
As all this drama unfolded, the sky began to clear a bit and it was warming up nicely. It was now 10:30. We had left camp at 8:45 and had covered only 10 kms in that hour and 45 minutes. I guess that's the price you have to pay for traveling in unfamiliar territory.
We rode through rolling hills and farmland with poppies, lavender and daisies blooming all over. By noon we were already hungry again and stopped for some groceries in Pacsa. We sat on a bench by a fountain and enjoyed lots of good fruit and some bread. We bought a small plastic bottle of what we thought was lemonade (it was right next to the Lipton ice tea on the shelf) but seemed to be unsweetened lemon juice. It was too sour to drink. We tried to water it down but that didn't even work. We still haven't been able to find anything comparable to what we know as lemonade here.
The hills came next. The road went through some pretty forest areas and more farmland and the hills got much longer and steeper. It was still quite windy today but nothing like yesterday. We flew down hill after hill only to find an even longer uphill on the other side. It took us 3 hours to cover 32 kms where we stopped in the town of Nova for a very substantial snack - yes, hungry again. Here we had our first potato chips of the trip, Lays, which tasted exactly how we expected them to. We ate on a bench watching a big bird's nest on the top of an electric pole. The mother bird (it was a large one that looked like a stork) stood up and the father bird flew away. We didn't see any chicks.
The remaining 14 kms into the town of Lenti flattened out fairly nicely which was a break for our tired legs. Signs led us to the campground. It was like all the others with hedges separating the sites. This one was quite crowded, though, while the others were empty, probably because it's Saturday. John fixed a problem with his bike. He somehow bent a tooth on his big chain ring. He bent it back with a pliers and we'll see how that works.
We walked into town for dinner. John got some honey mustard turkey & french fries and Marie had beef goulash. We had the German phrase book out because the menu was in Hungarian and German only. We were pleasantly surprised that the food we were given was actually what we thought we ordered! You have to watch it around here. Every menu has brains on it in one form or another.
Kms 72.08
Time 4:13:34
Avg 17.0
Max 48.4
No comments:
Post a Comment