After a good night’s sleep in the roadside motel, I tried my luck at the breakfast buffet downstairs. lots of plates of sliced meats, cold-cuts, cheese and the like, as well as different breads, cereals etc and bacon. So had cereal and some eggs and bacon and hit the road. Long ride out through the bottom of Germany. And off course don’t forget to stop and buy a vignette for a couple of Euros.
This is a small sticker that you have to have to drive on Austrian roads, kind of like a tax on visitors. But, if you don’t have one then it’s a €120 fine, and they even have convenient credit card machines in the back of the police wagons.
After a long ride across the top of Austria and around Vienna in bright sunshine I bore off where my friend Ben told me to in order to take a small 50km scenic road from Vienna to Bratislava. Very pretty spot and lovely biking road. Strange to think that this was the edge of the Iron Curtain only 20 years earlier. And how strange to meet Ben, who I had not seen in some six or so years, at the old frontier crossing – I on my little KLR and he on a rather nice BMW R1200GS. 
Funny, would never have thought when we were studying 20thC history at Friends School that 25 years later we’d be meeting up on motorbikes on the old frontier. You couldn’t predict it if you tried.
Ben seemed to like my old bone-shaker and after the rides she’s been on you can never get rid of her. Followed Ben into the maze of streets in Bratislava and ended up chez McGurk and met his better half Andrea Omanova. Great spot near the centre of the city overlooking a small square with a cafe and terasse or two. And after unpacking the bike we headed over to the cafe for a beer and a catchup, which off course lasted long into the night over many glasses of good Slovak beer, oddly enough called “Kelt”!
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