The is the third leg of riding about 500km of the Iron Curtain Trail or FeCT.

A Ride too Far Austria/Czech/Hungry – (60km)

This was supposed to be a simple ride.  We picked up the trail where I had left it a few weeks ago, through Bratislava and zig zags down to a convenient railway station allowing for a good ride pick up later on… that was the plan.  Instead it became a comedy of errors of route finding, construction detours, poor signage, a bit of bushwhacking, missed trains and some generous albeit drunk Austrians.  All in all a good day.

Bratislava – Where the F*CK is the Trail

I picked up the trail after a short 6km leg from Marchegg to the Friendship bridge.The route was good all the way into Bratislava.  Some of the walking trails showing their age being overgrown or somewhat broken.  As a warning Iron Curtain Trail signage in Bratislava is at best spotty, is hopefully not missing and at worst confusing and contradictory.

Getting to the first bridge that crossed the Danube presented our first mystery relating to signage.  The route involved going far back toward the bridge proper and take a ramp up to the pedestrian walks below the deck and on the sides of the bridge.  Clear signage to get you through a dark parking lot, nope.  Maybe a few clues spray painted on the pavement, nope.  And thus our first route finding fiasco had us trying to get up to the car deck where we discovered not pedestrian access.

Once across the bridge, the routing out of Bratislava consisted of a single sign directing us with vague ‘somewhere in that general direction’ accuracy.  Needless to say, bring a VERY good map to Bratislava, take it VERY slow and watch carefully and either a GPS or a Slovak enable smart phone are good additions as well.

Okay Signage and a Shark Tooth Border

The Hungarian/Austrian/Slovak borders south of Bratislava are a series of jagged saw tooth projections into each others territories.  Given that this border was heavily fortified, it must have taken enormous manpower given the elongations the border contours would have caused – which of course is exactly why the Hungarians opened the border because they could not afford to fix the then aging infrastructure.

Once again signage is okay to non-existence so be prepared to do a bit of route finding along the way.  Say hello to the occasional Austrian soldier who is keeping vigil because of the recent waves of migration from the eastern countries.  Of course one of the joys of route finding is being completely off the grid.  That happened in one leg when we ended up ‘bush whacking’ over a fairly overgrown trail and then enjoyed a few km of gravel roads until we could pick up a hard top surface riding into our final destination, Mönchhof.

A Missed Train and Friendly Austrians

From Mönchhof we thought we would enjoy a beer and meal in Neusiedler See (lake).  Alas we got off at the wrong station which may be just as well as there does not seem to be much in the way of services.  Nevertheless found cold beer and a passable Chinese supper at another train station.  As we were leaving, some nearby Austrians invited us for a drink –  a nice hospitable gesture – that caused us to miss our train by about 30 seconds.  Little did we know that next train just happened to be not an hour later but a full two hours later.

So, an eventful ride that was about 20km longer than intended marked by lots of route finding, generous invitations, missing signs and a very strange train schedule!

60km of the FeCT. Map courtesy of bikemap.net.

Route map (purged of all the bits where we circled around lost).

A Few Pics

The trusty steed at the Devin memorial

These guys were feeding bread crumbs to the Carp in the water. Those are not rapids but were instead a few hundred large carp fighting for the food.

The Sea can in the distance where for the soldiers monitoring this remote out post. Note the deer just to the left of the road.

Tri-corner where Austria, Slovakia and Hungry meet. I was Austrian and Gift (right) was feeling a bit more Hungari(an)

The Score!