A new day, a new country

We're into the second week of our bike trip now and we've left Austria behind. Before we left, we stayed in the town of Bad-Deutsch Altenburg. The main attraction there was the nearby ruins of the Roman city of Carnuntum. Eager to visit, we biked through a thunderstorm to get there. We checked out the old amphitheatre, but we were most impressed by a huge gate, the Heidentor (Heathen's Gate), that is still partially standing. Eventually the rain let up and we biked across the Slovakian border to their capital of Bratislava. Here we are staying on a botel (boat-hotel) floating in the Danube.

We explored Bratislava today, which is small compared to some other capitals. It has a colourful medieval city centre and a castle up on a hill. We climbed up to the castle to check out the view. The thing that caught our eye the most wasn't a church or monument, it was a huge communist-era housing project that seemed to take up the entire southern bank of the river. Tomorrow we end our brief visit to Slovakia and enter Hungary for the final stretch towards Budapest.