I’m back for another update. On Saturday, I checked out of the spa hotel and rode the length of Magrit Island. It’s a big park. Really lovely with different gardens and activity areas.
I heard a bunch of kids and sounds like a little carnival, so I stopped. I think the idea was carnival type activities you might have done in medieval times?!? Maybe?
So, in this one, the guy in the funny hat gets a kid to come up to the “catapult” (a net strung across 2 poles). He has a bunch of round stuffed animals with ears and he shoves an ear through the net. The kid pulls in the ear, stretching the net, lets go and fires the stuffed animal at a ring in the ground. So lame and yet so funny.
Here we have rock’m sock’m knights.
And in this one, the guy revs up the crowd really well. The kid on the ground has on 4 sleeves (one in each arm and leg). I think maybe they represent something (dragons???). The other kid has on a special shirt. And on the mark, she runs over and pulls the sleeves off the other kid while the man counts. It’s literally over in a couple seconds! Again, just so lame, but I couldn’t not watch!
Then I headed off to the nearest full train station, on the Pest side. The plan was for me to ride the train down to the far end of Lake Balaton to meet Rick. So, I got to the huge station. Can’t figure out where the human ticket office is. Try the ticket machine but can’t find the station name I need. Sit around got a long time trying to figure things out on various apps and decide that the train line to from Lake Balaton connects to station Buda Deli (on the Buda side of the river), but I can’t figure out the connection from there to the station where I am, on the Pest side. So, I went looking further for a ticket office and eventually find it outside.
The first lady I talk to doesn’t speak English, so she points to her right, so I go to the next one and she also points to the right. On the fourth and final one, she speaks a little English. I say I want to go to station Balatonberemy and she says “Buda Deli”. So, I ask how do I get to Buda Deli station and she points at my bike! So, I biked there! Got the ticket and all went well from there.
Rick met me at the little station right near a naturist camp where we stayed 2 nights.
While there, I tried to figure out where to go next. I really wanted to go to some farm in Austria that would be more or less along Rick’s path, but the problem is that there aren’t that many and when I’d find one I liked, it turned out I’d have to bike 3 miles up a steep hill to get there from whatever station (which would actually mean me pushing a bike up a hill for 3 miles). And train connections moving from Hungary to Austria (or for that matter, even within Hungary – see previous train story), can be tricky. Each line is run by independent operators. So, you can’t necessarily even get a ticket all the way to your final destination until you get to a station where you shift from one operator to another.
I finally decided to just head to Salzburg, Austria, which is on the border with Germany, so a short way back to Munich when it’s time. Rick thought I could do it by going to Gyor, Hungary, then getting a train to Salzburg from there. And that was mostly right. The unexpected part was on the first train when one of the conductors told me, in Hungarian, that I needed to get off the train at Celldomolk. But when we got to Celldomolk, there was a little 2-car train to Gyor right there. Hop off one and get on the other! (I make sound easy, but I literally needed help getting the darn bike up and down stairs of the train every single time.)
At Gyor, again I found a ticket office, and while they didn’t speak much English (they spoke Hungarian and German), they got tickets for me and my bike (yes, a bike requires its own ticket) with no train changes all the way to Salzburg! And I had plenty of time for a bite of lunch before the train. Got to Salzburg around 7 pm tonight. Checked into a hotel, found a nearby restaurant for dinner, and settled in to do THIS!
Sounds very hectic, but it wasn’t horrible. Just takes time to figure stuff out. And the language barrier adds a bit of uncertainty. But it all worked out fine. And Salzburg is full of English speakers.