56 km (35 miles) – Total so far: 228 km (142 miles)

We left Győr round about 9:00am after a rather average breakfast. The hotel was nice and the people lovely, but the breaskfast was meager .. oh well back to Slovakia this evening, so we shall see. We meandered out of the back of Győr, past, we think, a huge Audi factory and crisscrossing over the train tracks many times. We met cyclists we had seen before and also new ones, it is nice to see familiar faces – it confirms that you are probably going the correct way. Once fully out of Győr we began to climb uphill on some rough roads.

We stopped a few times, mostly to gulp down a mouthful of drink, before continuing onwards. There were many dogs here, all of them safely behind fences, but the barking was a cacophony of sound occasionally. We also spotted a trio of kittens .. awwwwww….

After plunging back downhill, we turned onto a main-ish road and plodded our way through Bőny, Bana and Bábolna. We stopped in the final one, slurping a cold Sprite and eating an ice-cream that the owner gave us for free – which was very nice of her. Bábolna is famous as the seat of Hungarian horse breeding, but other than a couple of shops selling riding gear, we didn’t see any evidence of this. We also gained anoth “scalp”, we overtook a post-lady on her bike, she may or may not have been delivering mail at the time, but that is immaterial, it is another victory !

Hungary has acres upon acres of corn growing in huge fields everywhere we go. Together with sunflowers they are the stand-out crops so far in our trip.

After leaving Bábolna we climbed a rather steep hill and then decended into Ács, a town which looked positively wild-western with dusty streets and low buildings with barriers outside the shops…we didn’t stop, but it looked lovely.

After Ács we went “off road” through some magical woods. The path was a little rough in places, but it was cooler than the road even if a little more humid. It was a very pleasant break from the roads we had been on for most of the last 30km and caused a few “moments” as we wobbled our way around puddles of mud. Sadly, no one actually fell off into one .. but there is always tomorrow.

We arrived in Komárom, which is the Hungarian half of Komárno-Komárom a city that was split down the middle after WWI. Our hotel is on the Slovakian side so we scampered over the Elisabeth Bridge, which is known as the Friendship bridge, and arrived at our hotel feeling very, very hot. It has become apparent that hotels that have lifts seem to put our luggage in our room, but hotels that don’t leave the luggage in reception and expect us to heave it up flights of stairs .. hmmm …

Anyway, we all showered, bathed, and generally became more fragrant and then slipped out of the hotel into the town. Like all the places on the trip so far it looked nice, but was very, very quiet. Hardly a soul was out eating so we trapsed around for half an hour or so then eventually found somewhere to eat. After this we had a very nice and extrememly cheap ice cream, returned to the hotel and fell asleep.