Halfway to Istanbul!

Day 36,
Budapest, Hungary

If all goes according to our route schedule, we are halfway! And our bikes are starting to show it. We spent a good hour cleaning and repairing our donated Batavus bikes in the parkade of our hotel this morning. All break pads needed to be changed and the cables tightened, but other than easy maintainence, our modes of transport are in fine working order.

The quality of our biking paths have significantly decreased ever since entering Hungary. We are finding ourselves on busier roads and bumpy dirt tracks. Luckily, we have good tires that allow quick movement on pavement, but also have good tread so that we can take on dirt and mud without carneige!

I’m sure you all want to know how we’re all getting along! Well, as you can imagine, it’s hard for people to bite their tongues or conceal character flaws 24 hrs a day. Add to that being over-tired from a night or two of cacophony-snoring and even deciding where to have dinner can bring on an argument or two. However, we still like to spend our rest days together doing the sightseeing thing and we even had a big slumber party the other night when all six of us crammed into a room to save a few forints.

At the moment, David, Walter, Troy and Cindy are swimming in the thermal baths in a hotel nearby. My sights were set on a mud pack bath, but that part of the spa wasn't open, so I decided to save it for another time and walk around. The city of Budapest is divded by the Donau River. One side was called Buda, one side Pest until they joined in....sometime. It really is a beautuiful city with a lot of great architecture.