clairedavieswriter

And that’s Team Bernard’s 11th end-to-end done.

Together (with no mechanicals – chapeau to Bernard the bike; no punctures – kudos to my amazing Schwalbe tyres; and only minor routing glitches – merci Guillaume the Garmin), we’ve pedalled 938k / 582 miles and climbed over 5,800m / 19,000ft in 13 days to reach Austria’s easternmost corner:

You’ll recall that her westernmost spot was a tri-point shared with Switzerland and Liechtenstein. Satisfyingly, her easternmost spot is also a tri-point, marked by a triangular obelisk. The side you can see here is marked Ö for Österreich:

The other two are marked M for Magyarország (Hungary) and S for Slovakia:

I actually reached the Austria-Hungary border a few hundred metres earlier, on the road:

By the way, that wooden post with barbed wire curling round it in the second picture commemorates the old Iron Curtain. It’s extraordinary to think that little more than 35 years ago, this boundary would’ve been physically blocked, with any movement controlled by guards, watchtowers and decades of mutual suspicion. Just before getting here I joined EuroVelo 13, the Iron Curtain Trail. Now that would make an interesting trip:

Aside from reaching our destination, highlights today included:

Returning to the Danube in the cool of the morning:

Our first sighting of the Slovakian capital on a signboard:

And stumbling across a military exercise which was using the Roman ruins of Carnuntum as a feed station. As groups of footsore-looking squaddies straggled in looking for food, they were greeted by two Roman centurions and a horn-player wearing a toga. How to boost morale, Austrian-style?

I was curious about this sign, and Gloria Google informed me that it was warning passers-by of ice falling from the wind turbines. Chance would be a fine thing today, I thought;

I enjoyed this town name, as proof that we were very nearly no longer in a German-speaking country:

But this was my Sign of the Day, on the outskirts of the very ordinary town of Regelsbrunn. Are there really marmots here? It seems a very long way from their usual habitat:

But my highlight of the day came about because, when reviewing Guillaume’s route yesterday, I’d spotted more of this:

Without even a glimpse of the river to distract us. And, as it turned out, with a headwind to boot:

So I’d decided to reward Bernard with one last boat ride:

When I reached the river, there was no sign of a ferryman, or indeed a dock on the other side:

The ferryman did eventually appear, but his ferry looked distinctly sketchy, and lacked a crucial component – namely, a working engine:

But at least the skipper had supplied me and the only other customer with coffee (from the bowels of the boat that served as a dock):

So while he rustled up a new battery for his engine, I got chatting with András, who unwittingly offered a brilliant example of the kind of freedoms that we in the UK used to enjoy as citizens of the EU. A Hungarian, he lives in Vienna and plays French Horn for the Slovak Symphony Orchestra in Bratislava. He was cycling (without his horn, disappointingly – it lives in Bratislava) to a rehearsal for a concert commissioned by the Slovak President:

Finally, the engine sparked, and we were underway, with the skipper demonstrating an admirably relaxed attitude to passenger safety (that’s an open gate in front of him to the left. Between me and him – just a yawning gap to the river):

And the adventure wasn’t over yet: where would we land? It turned out that the reason we couldn’t see a dock was because there wasn’t one:

Having scrambled off the craft and up the pebble bank, we just took a guess as to which way to go along this track:

It was a schöne Bootsfahrt, indeed:

I’ll add a few general reflections in the next day or so, but in the meantime, it’s Auf Wiedersehen, Österreich, and Danke Schön!