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Tour date: 1-17 June 2005. Total distance: 1400 km.
Bicycle Tour: Eastern Europe (Italy - Slovenia - Croatia - Hungary - Slovakia - Austria - Czech Republic)
Thomas Driemeyer2005-10-16 14:37:51
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with ornate baroque palaces, but also nondescript 20th-century additions. Several pleasant wide pedestrian streets are packed with cafes in the middle, back to back to back. Amazing that there would be so many people who have time for sitting in a cafe on a Monday noon.
Leaving Zagreb to the east is boring and a fight with traffic. After leaving the city we were on a narrow two-lane road. Here nobody left much space when passing. The first 40km or so after leaving downtown are quite boring - few trees, flat, scattered houses everywhere but no villages, various industrial facilities, and garbage dumps. The last 30km to Varazdin became more scenic, with little traffic, small hills, forests, and villages.
Varazdin is an especially nice surprise, with its beautiful downtown and walled old town. This is the kind of town I like to visit on a bicycle tour - small enough to get into and out of, a scenic downtown to walk in the evening, and small hotels or pensione, restaurants, and shops. Much nicer than Zagreb actually because although Zagreb has a very nice downtown, it stretches along the base of a hill forever, forcing us to ride busy city streets for hours.
In Varazdin we stayed at the Pansion Maltar, whose reception and restaurant is centrally located across from the big red Konzum supermarket, but the actual guest rooms are a km off towards a road and train crossing that made it rather noisy.
HUNGARY
From Varazdin it's not far to the Slovenian border. Slovenia is a narrow strip between Croatia and Hungary there. As we crossed the border, the temperature dropped from 20 to 11 degrees C, it started raining, and we had a strong headwind. In Hungary we used route 75 all the way to Keszthely, a town at the northwestern tip of the Balaton with many hotels.
Along much of the way in Hungary, we had a quite ridable bike path that kept us
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See photographs from:
Slovenia Gallery
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Slovakia Gallery
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Italy Gallery
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Hungary Gallery
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Czech Republic Gallery
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Croatia Gallery
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Austria Gallery
