is the start of the motorbike season for most of us.
WIMA-Austria usually rewards the mounting of the taps, the dusting of the chain and the squeezing in the shrunken motorbike trousers with a joint season opening ride.
This year, in the extraordinary length of 4 days, we plan to discover the facets of Slovakia.
We will visit the low and high Tatras on small and bigger roads, enjoy the sun, the country and the people and have a good time anyway.
Ok, at least that was the plan, but without a plan we wouldn’t have set off at all.
We started on Friday morning in Aspern, because the combination of McDonald’s and a petrol station is simply brilliant before the start of a tour.
A bit of waiting (flat tyre on the approach), a bit of wrenching (to compensate for workshop mishaps) later, we make our way east. It would have been nice to take the ferry at Angern and immediately enter the first hills of Slovakia, but unfortunately the restoration that started in winter is still going on and therefore the ferry is out of service at least until Monday.
Well, maybe we can use it on the way home?
Therefore, it continues along the Danube to Hainburg and on to Slovakia.
Past Bratislava and a bit of motorway to the north. And, hey, if the girls thought the gpx navigation files distributed in advance would last longer than 1 hour and map the route, they were – once again – mistaken.
Of course, we took the wrong exit, because who trusts a sat nav when our own sense of direction says it’s time to initiate our own spontaneous direction turns?
At least this leads us to a comfortable lunch break in Piestany, before we finally turn east shortly before Trencin and lose our way in the mountains, and I emphasise, we didn’t get lost.
But, as always, when Master Random plays along, beautiful areas and fantastic roads come before and under our wheels. An added bonus: The persistently clammy temperature doesn’t make the frozen smile disappear, even on more difficult hairpin bends.
The curved federal road 14 remains in our memory as a recommendation, where we knead our stiff fingers once more at the top of the pass before heading downhill to Banska Bistrica, towards the end of the first day’s riding.
But first we go up the mountain to the Skiresort Sachticka, where we revive our tired and cold limbs.
In addition to a small but excellent dinner, we go to the wellness area at a late hour, where we have a good time in the steam bath with deep heat for a long time.
On the well-known adventure scale, we were able to tick off almost all the points today, even surviving a bear.
