Starting a trip certainly isn’t the easiest part of it. Initially, we had planned to start our trip on the previous day. However, it was forecasted that the weather during the weekend would be dreadful: single digit temperatures, windy, heavy rainfall.
The outlook for Sunday was better than the one for Saturday. Therefore we decided to postpone the start by one day. This turned out to be a wise decision, as the weather on Saturday truly was lousy. Also, we still found a whole load of things to do last-minute.
With too little sleep during the night, we awoke at 6am in order to be ready for departure at 7am. This turned out to be a little optimistic, especially since we had never mounted all our luggage on our bikes. At 7:45am we said goodby to Chris’s family and took off. While better than on the previous day, the weather was not ideal. When we started, the thermometer read 2°C, so we decided for the warm pair of gloves.
The cold temperatures continued to affect us during the day as we had to take regular pauses in order to warm up again. Side note: Heated grips are one of the must-have features on travel bikes! As a consequence of the low temperatures and our inexperience with long rides, we progressed slower than we wished. Therefore, we could not reach our anticipated goal for the day which was the “Paprika Hotel” just behind the Austrian-Hungarian border. Instead we got a small room in a hostel right next to the highway, so we can get off quickly tomorrow.
