Halfway through today's ride we stopped at the Hungarian National Stud farm at Babolna, built in 1789 to breed horses for the Austro-Hungarian army. They breed Arabian thoroughbreds descended from a horse named Shagyra imported from Syria in 1822. We happened to arrive at the time a tour was starting so we got to visit the grounds, the stallions (some as much as 25 years old), the riding school building, and carriage museum. There's an imperial guesthouse, now a hotel. It was booked up, but we ended up later at a very comfortable and very inexpensive penzio (small hotel) at Komarom, on the Danube. A sister city across the river in Slovakia was a no-go for the people here from 1918 when the Austro-Hungarian empire was broken up until 1991 when a bridge bombed in WW2 was rebuilt. On the way from Babolna to Komarom we found the world's worst bike path- see today's other post.
At day's end, we happened to meet a man named Jeff from California riding another Bike Friday, but not a tandem. We'd heard about him from other riders, and he about us, but we hadn't connected before. By the way, he was the first other American rider we've met since we started this trip almost a month ago.
No comments:
Post a Comment