Budapest to the Black Sea - Day 1

Having completed this journey, my wife and I thought we should actually share some of what we found with the wide world. However we are very lazy and have never got round to actually writing the thing up, so I am going write it up in bits here.

The next few posts will describe a journey undertaken in the summer of 2010, from Budapest, to the Black Sea, roughly along the route of the Danube, the journey took us three weeks, starting in Hungary, then visiting Croatia, Serbia, Bulgaria and finally Romania.

Here I am, all smiles and reflective panniers, in Budapest Airport, with our recently re-constructed bikes, all ready and rearing to go.  When putting a bike on a plane, it is customary to let some air out of the tyres, this stops them exploding when the plane is at altitude.  Before loading the bikes on the plane we let what we thought was 'enough' air out. When the bikes were returned to us through a door next the the outsized baggage belt, it was obvious that the tyres were completly flat... maybe 'enough' was not actually 'enough'. Mind you, we were pretty relived to find both bikes there, with two wheels each and no obvious damage*  After few minutes of pumping we found that someone had very kindly let all the air out of our tyres, and we were very releived to find that all they needed was pumping up! (* more on this later...)

The next exiting moment was getting into town from the airport, this involved duelling with traffic on a dual caridgeway - not actually sure if this was strictly legal, but no one seemed to mind and we were quite soon in the suburbs of Budapest. We headed pretty much straight for our hotel, the hotel papillion, where we received a warm welcome, storing our bikes was no problem, and although not in the middle of town was just fine for our needs.