Vienna to Bratislava to Budapest

Vienna:
Lots of old buildings and museums. I mostly wandered around looking at the architecture, and visited the arms museum and the imperial treasury. The best meal I had in Vienna was from a Turkish fast food place where they served something called a schnitzel semmel which was basically a standard Turkish gyro except with the gyro meat replaced with schnitzel.

Pretty much the whole city looks like this:

The arms museum had, well, lots of arms and armor:

Double barreled rifle!

One day I hope to own a hat this ridiculous:

Apparently at some point they put faces on the helmets which just made them look incredibly creepy:

 I bet this helmet gets all the ladies:

The imperial treasury had some of the most amazing gold and silver crafting I have ever seen. The pictures don't really do them justice.

Forget that painting I posted earlier, the bavarian kings had a real life holy hand grenade:

Trying to leave Vienna the next day, I had been warned that they were doing the Vienna marathon, but that didn't make it any easier to get past. I saw runners with numbers up in the 8000s, and there were certainly a lot of people there.

After finally making it to Bratislava I met a host there who is apparently the biggest bike activist in the city, and we spent the evening with a bunch of his friends tinkering with really old bikes trying to fix them.
The next day I walked around the Bratislava old town. I made it to the castle, which of course was open every day of the week except Mondays, and it was a Monday.

A lot of the churches in the old town were closed as well, like this weird looking one:

I walked all the way to the top of the city to see Slavin,which is a monument to the 6000ish soviet men who died liberating the city in WWII.

Eisenstein would've been proud of the staircase leading up to the monument:

Two days in Slovakia, and it was off to Hungary. It only took about an hour in the country until I found my first Hungarian, drunk out of his mind at 10am trying to drive into town on a small country road. About 10 minutes later I found another two drunk Hungarians walking bikes home. Apparently I am now in eastern Europe.
I had a long day as I was trying to make it to the unesco site of Benedictine Abbey. I made it there, but not before they closed (of course). The abbey sits on-top a hill, and you can see it for about 12km in any direction

I already had a reservation in Budapest for the 17th and I knew it was a long way, so I continued as long as I could to make the longest day yet, for 85 miles and I camped along a set of train tracks where my earplugs came in handy.

As I was eating my pasta dinner around 9:30 I sat and watched someone driving a huge piece of farming equipment roll up and start tilling a chunk of field literally 10 feet from where I was camped. Not wanting to end up torn into tiny bits has been moved to the top of my list of reasons to not camp in someone's field.

Today I continued on the Eurovelo 6 route which brought me through Esztergom which is home to this:

I rolled into Budapest around 8, and so far it looks quite cool. That made today my longest day yet with 90 miles cycling, for a total of 175 miles in two days.

Some random thoughts:
Now that winter is behind me, at least stopping to take pictures is quicker and easier without having to remove my gloves, and waking up and breaking camp in the morning isn't slow and painful.

Someone needs to compile a list of translations for "still water" in all languages. I absolutely can't stand the taste of sparkling water and that seems to be about 99% of what stores want to sell. The grocery store crapshoot of emergency water purchasing is getting old.

It's not a camera! I wish I had a dollar for every time I was asked if this was a camera, especially from other cyclists who honestly should know better:

At least it keeps them acting friendly if they think they're being recorded.