{"id":353,"date":"2015-07-23T16:20:25","date_gmt":"2015-07-23T21:20:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.irelandbybicycle.com\/rickpress\/?p=353"},"modified":"2024-06-17T18:57:27","modified_gmt":"2024-06-17T22:57:27","slug":"climbing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.irelandbybicycle.com\/index.php\/climbing\/","title":{"rendered":"Climbing"},"content":{"rendered":"

Three countries in two days (Hungary to Slovakia to Austria). I feel like a backpacker.<\/p>\n

The heat prevented a good night’s sleep (that and staying up far too late) – not a lot of energy. Further early grocery shopping led to a later departure than preferred. Uneventfully finding EV6 out of the city, I slammed into major headwinds, with forward progress being in the neighborhood of 10 kph actual. Gearing down and crawling forward, outside of Hainberg I found castles to my left and right.<\/p>\n

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The ideal time to go castle exploring – when not making progress anyway. A careful examination of the latter castle above shows the extreme elevation. Only stopping once, I climbed the monster hill, which I later found a 13% grade (!). Finding the parking lot for the castle, I carefully hiked up a long tortuous graveled path,\u00a0to find the castle ruin at the pinnacle. On the way up, I passed two bikes parked close to the peak – more power to them! A pleasant and worthwhile hike, I wandered about and headed back down. The town was also a pleasant surprise, as medieval walls surrounded almost the entire city.<\/p>\n

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I never found the castle ruin to the right. I found another one along the way, more a jumble of collapsed stone. Now late in the day for the grand total of 20 km, I headed forth. On the exit side of Hainberg, the EV6 signs forked four different ways – two back and two forward. I cycled about 100 m out on each to check, and headed back from the third ran into two cyclists. Since I often use the incoming cyclists as the indicator for the correct path, I warned them I wasn’t quite sure where to go. Fortunately, they did!<\/p>\n

David and Sonia,\u00a0 brother and sister, student and physiotherapist, cycled out of Vienna in the morning in a loop, and headed back invited me to follow them. Also the owners of the two bikes at the castle, they of course took the course I had decided was least likely! Their research took us to a completely isolated and flawless cycle path through the countryside.<\/p>\n

While I cycle by default slightly faster,\u00a0 they took fewer breaks than I usually do, and we made good time to Vienna, where they pointed me on my way.<\/p>\n

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Vienna sprawls across the landscape, the centrally-located hostel being 8 km into town. Fortunately cycle paths abound, and the trip to the hostel uneventful. Beat from the headwinds, the constant pace, and the complete lack of sleep the night before I made an early night of it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Three countries in two days (Hungary to Slovakia to Austria). I feel like a backpacker. The heat prevented a good night’s sleep (that and staying up far too late) – not a lot of energy. Further early grocery shopping led to a later departure than preferred. Uneventfully finding EV6 out of the city, I slammed … Continue reading “Climbing”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[52],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-353","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-touring"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.irelandbybicycle.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/353","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.irelandbybicycle.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.irelandbybicycle.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.irelandbybicycle.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.irelandbybicycle.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=353"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.irelandbybicycle.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/353\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3960,"href":"https:\/\/www.irelandbybicycle.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/353\/revisions\/3960"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.irelandbybicycle.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=353"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.irelandbybicycle.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=353"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.irelandbybicycle.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=353"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}