22 May 2007

Things rarely go as planned.
Koszeg to Sopron
A warm, damp morning greeted us today as we set out for Balf and the thermal baths. The plan was to go to Balf today and take a rest day tomorrow and enjoy the healing waters. Things started out fine as we rode through farmland interspersed with forest and naure preseves. In the small village of Sopronhorpacs we decided to have lunch in a small park at the crossroads of town. After lunch the heat was on and and the wind was a bit pesty as we made our way towards Balf. Just befoe Rojtokmuzsaj John stopped to adust his gears and along came Richard from the Netherlands. He started his trip in Dbrovnak and is heading home. We chatted about bike adventures, exchanged contact info and then parted ways. Maybe we will cacth up with him when we reach the Netherlands. We cruised on stopping several times in what shade we could find to keep filling up on water. When we reached Balf we checked out the camping place and didn't think we could spend a whole day in this small village, and !
the map showed thermal baths and camping in Sopron only 8 km's away, so we headed there. Sopron is a much bigger town and we had wanted to miss it but we figured hey we can navigate it. Hah. After getting lost trying to find the info center we chanced upon Thomas who drew us a map of how to get to the campground about 5 km's out of town. Even though there was constuction blocking his route, we managed to find our way to the cmpground only to find it closed. Of course it was up a hill. We had spotted a Gasthaus on the way up and figured we would book in there for 2 nights. Instead John spotted a zimmer so we booked in there instead. We were told that there were a couple of mormom missionaries from Alaska staying there also and just before we were going to eat they stopped by and invited us over for dinner. We spent a wonderful evening exchanging travel stories with Jamie and Janelle.


Kms 68.6
Time 4:45:19
Avg 14.4
Max 46.1
Total 653.7