After a slow start this morning, Daniel, Derek and I drove for about 20 minutes to reach the national park at Badacsony. Amanda's essays are due by midnight on Saturday and as the internet connection is a bit unreliable, she decided to stay behind again and get as much done as possible.
After a quick stop at the tourist information centre to pick up a walking trail map, we drove up to the car park at the beginning of a four kilometre nature trail up the side of an extinct volcanic core which rises 436 metres above Lake Balaton. There are much longer walks that could be done but we decided that four kilometres was enough for us to do. Just as well really, as the first two kilometres were straight up and mostly steps ranging from little baby steps to giant steps that were a bit of a stretch for my short legs!
There were beautiful views of the lake to be seen at our frequent rest stops and we were all looking forward to the view from the top. After about an hour, we finally made it to the top to discover that the wooden lookout tower was falling to bits and the first half of the stairs were missing and as the trees were still pretty tall, we couldn't actually see anything much at all.
We decided to take a different path on the way down that seemed to make its way through a valley which we thought would be a bit more interesting than taking the steps straight down again.
It probably took us the same amount of time to get back to the car but it was a lovely walk through quite heavily wooded areas and we also came across what seemed to us to be the remains of a village at the bottom of the valley. There had been a stone quarry in the valley which had closed some time in the 1950s so we speculated that the village may have been housing for the quarry workers.
We were home again just after 4 o'clock and certainly felt we had earned our dinner. The waitress told us they were expecting a group of 27 cyclists in that night so the place was going to be full up.
The cyclists started arriving over a period of about 20 minutes starting at 6pm and seemed to belong to a Slovakian cycling team so they were quite a way away from home but they all seemed in pretty good spirits, so good in fact, they were toasting each other with shots of some sort of white spirit before they had even put their bikes away.
We were pretty tired after our walk so it was early to bed for us.
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