The Push East - Bratislava

We are now in Bratislava, having entered our seventh country so far, out of probably 19. We bashed straight along the Danube, which is MASSIVE, but made the journey relatively hill-free.

The past two days have been fairly large. We felt pretty good after Linz, and the key to covering distance, we've discovered, is to eat constantly throughout the day. Our legs are reasonable engines now, we just need to make sure they have fuel. So, the past couple of days, we pressed out 300km, all in the most severe headwind we've felt so far (20-30 kph). This decimated our average speed to a mere 21kph and saps morale and energy. Still, it felt good knowing we can do 150km a day in adverse conditions.

While checking the map of Austria, we were wondering where Vienna was, we couldn't see it anywhere:

Duncan: "Hey, Geoff, am I going mad? I can't find Vienna anywhere!"
Geoff: "Maybe it's quite small. I think it's somewhere in the middle."
Duncan: "Weird. Nevermind. Hey look, Wien is bloody massive! Probably a dump, lets blast through it."

We did blast through Wien, in about half an hour, stopping only at a Lidl for some much needed energy. Turns out Wien is Vienna, and we just missed one of the best cities of the trip. How dumb is that?!

Bratislava we thought would be an industrial heartland full of gangs and crime. It's actually really nice, the government has obviously laid down a lot of bones to sort out the roads and clean the place up. Still a fair bit of construction going on though.

Here's some 'interesting facts' about Albania from a book on Europe. No joke:

Albania is famous for having over 700,000 nearly invulnerable concrete bunkers from the Soviet era.
Did you know? Albania's streets, even the mountain passes, are all lined with discarded plastic bags.
Gun ownership in Albania is extremely high, fuelled by the resurgence of blood feuds. This leads to a endless cycle of violence and murder which stops only when the two families reconcile.

We need to up our daily kilometers to about 300 so we can bash through that place in a day!