Bratislava-Čunovo-Veľké Kosihy-Komárno.

Trip dist: 112 kms. Trip time: 4 hrs, 58 mins. Tot dist: 5,831 kms.

So, there are two routes to Budapest from Bratislava along the Danube. One, on the Slovak side of the river, shorter and completely flat, the other, along the Hungarian side, with a few hills with up to 200 meters elevation change and about 50 kms longer. Whether this other route is prettier or not is disputable, so which one does Elisa choose?

Don't worry folks, after 5,000 kms I've learned my lessons, and there is no point in wasting any time or letting any of the energy I miraculously still seem to have left after all this pedalling go to waste.

So I took the Slovak side. :)

Today was a nice, pretty, easy ride along the banks of the green Danube (sorry folks, but it is most definitely not blue like the Waltz says--unless you're color blind or have excess imagination, but anyway...), completely flat and aided by a generous, strong head wind that allowed me to easily pedal at 36 kms/hr (and surely even faster had I had a larger front gear) without much effort for the first 65 kms or so. As the radweg headed inland to avoid unpaved roads and to catch the N63, though, the wind turned not so cooperative and even outright recalcitrant, thus lengthening with its opposition my trip time significantly.

Komárno is pretty, but small. I arrived there at around 4:30 p.m., so after finding a hotel I decided to walk over to Hungary at Komárom right across the river, mostly because, how many of you can say: "Oh, yeah, yesterday I walked over to Hungary..." Hmmm?

Yeah, I thought it would give me some cool bragging rights, so up I went to Komárom, which actually used to be the same city as Komárno, until the 1920 Treaty of Trianon ceded the territory north of the Danube to Czechoslovakia, and the southern part to Hungary.

Does this arbitrary splitting up of a city at the end of some World War sound familiar to you?

Yeah. Thought so, too.