Leaving Budapest

Last night the weather turned nasty. It started to rain heavily and continued through the morning. Our hop on bus ticket included a river cruise that we were going to do this morning but the weather put a stop to that.

Instead we went to meet up with Gabor, who I'd met in Komoron and wanted to buy my bike. He said he didn't end up going to Eger last Saturday so I didn't miss anything. We had a coffee and I got some final photos of my bike. Gabor's bike now. He said he wanted to buy it "because it's a cool story". Fair enough!

I still had my sleeping bag, bike helmet and tent to offload. We went for a walk and I put the bike helmet on a bike locked up in the street. Last night we walked past a homeless man who had himself a mattress but only a thin blanket. We went back to give him the sleeping bag and tent but he wasn't there. We found his mattress stashed against a wall so we hid the sleeping bag and tent behind it. A little while later Mick checked if it was still there and the tent was gone. Hopefully he can get some use out of it.

I'm fairly sure Hungary is playing in the big stadium across the road tonight. Maybe euro qualifiers? If I knew I could have dumped my bag somewhere, got a ticket and watched. I went to have a look and the flares were going off outside the stadium.  I could probably still do that but I'm not getting more money out after getting ripped off the other night.

So now I'm continuing on buses and trains, staying in hostels and being a bit normal. If I want to be home for Christmas I'd have had to peddle quite a bit faster. Already I miss the freedom of the bike and how stress free it mostly was. I only ever really intended on seeing the battlefields by bike. I didn't expect that I'd enjoy the cycling. It maybe doesn't come across in the blog but the cycling was the highlight of most of my days. Except the day I went to La Havre. I still hate that day.

I had only 3 cities I absolutely had to visit before I left: Budapest, Krakow and Prague. Sorry Vienna, you were a bonus. So now I've visited one and should get to the other 2 over the next week and a half. I was tempted to say I'd ticked Budapest off but that seems really dismissive of a place that I still know only the most basic things about.