Off to the south...

The first thing we had to do today was say goodbye. And that wasn't so easy. Julia and Balazs told me several times that I could stay as long as I wanted. Thank you again for the great hospitality and we'll see you again. The departure was a little later than planned, but I set off shortly after 10am.

Fortunately, I had slept very well and for a long time, so unlike yesterday I felt well rested. And so cycling was more fun again. After a little over an hour, I was at the other end of Budapest and now it was back to the countryside. The route was signposted from time to time, but without my GPS (or a map) I wouldn't have found the way. At one point, the «road», if you can still call it that, was so bad that I seriously wondered if this was really the way. But then two cyclists came towards me - so apparently it was.

The Danube flows very slowly here, as there is almost no gradient. The difference in altitude between the start and finish was still about 20 metres. The Danube was now lined with small houses, although I wasn't sure whether they were really inhabited all the time or just used as weekend and holiday residences. Perhaps both. Also typical were the many small (private?) platforms over the water, on which there were benches or which were used for launching for various water sports. I took my lunch break on one such platform. I hope that was allowed. Nobody seemed to mind.

However, the path was a little less beautiful than the pretty little houses by the river. After my lunch break, this led along these little houses and the Danube towards the south. However, the road (not paved) was so littered with bumps and potholes that I only rode standing up for about 45 minutes, which was more BMX than anything else. With an average of more than one stroke per second, nothing else would have made sense. On the other hand, the tarmac road, on which a sign pointed out 5 km of bumps, was just great for riding.

But it got even worse: after a short recovery phase - the road was tarmac for a few kilometres and without any major bumps - the official route of EuroVelo 6 led across a meadow - you really can't call it a road anymore - on which one tuft of grass followed another and even the only slightly rutted path was so full of bumps that it was almost impossible to make any progress. With a lot of effort, the result was a speed of 12-13 km/h. I was amazed that this was still an official cycle route. I therefore took a different route at the next opportunity. When I used Google Maps to search for a route south, the EV6, which I was already on, wasn't even an option. Google Maps doesn't even know the route. That actually says it all.

The alternative suggested by Google wasn't that great in places either, about the same as the BMX track before, so I decided to take the main road. There wasn't that much traffic and now I could roll southwards again at a leisurely pace. The speed was now 26-27 km/h with a significantly lower heart rate than before at 12-13 km/h.

Despite everything, I felt much better today than yesterday. Due to the late departure and the sometimes precarious road situation, I only arrived in Harta at around 17:30. But I'm fine with arriving before 6pm, which is still daylight, even though the sun sets about half an hour earlier here than in Switzerland - I've already travelled that far. But at the same time, the days are getting longer.