A Gorgeous Bike Ride Through the Slovak Countryside
Tony recently got a fancy new carbon-frame road bike with electronic shifting, and he brought it with them when he and his family drove out to Podrečany on Thursday. As I'm still very much a cycling fanatic, he told me I was free to ride it. I always bring a pair of bike shorts and a cycling jersey with me to Slovakia just in case the opportunity arises, and I'm glad I did. Luckily, I just barely fit into Tony's cycling shoes (his feet are probably a half inch smaller than mine).
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| Tony's carbon-frame road bike. |
On Friday afternoon, I took Tony's bike for a spin after he had already done an afternoon ride, but as soon as I was a few miles out, it started to sprinkle, and once I got a mere four or five miles away, to Lake Ružiná, it started pouring, so I had turn around and go back, as I really don't enjoy riding in the rain. I was completely drenched once I made it back home, to the point where I was wringing my clothes out before hanging them up to dry.
I tried again Saturday morning, despite only getting about four hours of sleep the night before (damn insomnia), and this time the weather was cooperating. I rode down to the road to Halič, and turned right onto the road that goes up into the hills to the small village of Tuhár, where locals eye you suspiciously like characters from Deliverance. I did a similar ride back in 2015 on Christmas Eve, which also went through Tuhár (and then on through Divín and Ružiná), and I was quite struck by the beauty of the scenery.
[Note, some of these photos were taken a couple days later from the car when we took a drive through this same route, as I didn't snap enough usable photos while I was on the bike. Sorry about the reflection of the defogging vent in the windshield at the bottom of some pics.]
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| The wonderfully smooth road to Halič. |
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| Entering the tiny ramshackle village of Gregorova Vieska (population: 141; first written mention: 1393), which is between Podrečany and Halič. |
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| A view of Halič Castle from the entrance to the village of Stará Halič. It's about here where you turn left to go to Tuhár (in the opposite direction that this photo was taken). |
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| On the road to Tuhár. |
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| Entering the riveting village of Tuhár! |
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| Tuhár |
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| Lots of action on the main drag in Tuhár! |
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| Here's a photo I took on a bike ride through Tuhár on Christmas Eve, 2015, which I love, so I'm recycling it. |
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| Tuhár as seen from the same road as the photo above, taken on this recent ride. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to get a photo from the exact same spot as above, because trees and foliage have all since filled in and/or gotten taller. So this was taken from down the road a bit. |
Then from Tuhár, I ascended a steeper but still fairly mild, steady climb up to
the even smaller village of Polichno, where I did not see a
single living, breathing human being. There's honestly not a lot to say about Polichno (population: 128; first written mention: 1467). Terezia's uncle had an awful story about the village, however, involving some incident that occurred over 40 years ago when a resident there shot and killed six intruders as they were scaling his fence one night. One of the intruders was, according to Terezia's uncle, from Podrečany. No idea what these intruders wanted from the guy or why he felt the need to shoot them. I'm sure this little story is exactly what the people of Polichno would love for their village to be known for. So, to make up for that, I'll mention that Polichno is the home village of a famous Slovak novelist, short story writer, and playwright from the late 19th and early 20th centuries named Božena Slančíková, who also used the pen name Timrava. The village has a monument to her there.
I find these remote little villages fascinating, though, because I'm always wondering who the hell lives there, why they are still there, and what life is like in these places that are smaller and more removed from civilization than even Podrečany.
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| No signs of life in Polichno, a remote village deep in the hills of the Novohrad region. |
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| Leaving Polichno. |
There was a bigger loop I could have done from Polichno, but given that I was operating on four hours of sleep and had a throbbing headache because of that, I opted to go back down the hill to Tuhár, then I descended the newly paved, smooth-as-butter road into Divín, went straight to Lake Ružiná from there, and rounded part of the shore past the touristy stuff and vacation cottages, and then after riding over the dam, I headed back to Podrečany. It was a short 22-mile loop, but that was about all I could manage on so little sleep.
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| The back road into Divín from Tuhár. |
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| I feel lame about recycling this photo of Divín Castle, taken in late 2015 (on a bike ride) just outside Divín village, but none of the similar photos I've taken since have come out as nicely. The photos I took of the castle on this most recent bike ride sucked eggs. |
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| Another recycled photo of Divín castle, taken from across Lake Ružiná on
a late-2015 bike ride. Again, I've tried taking photos since, but they
just haven't turned out right. |
What really struck me was the beautiful scenery throughout the ride. The lush, vibrant green rolling hills, the sweeping views from atop those hills, and the run-down old rust-colored villages that these country back roads take you through, all made for an immensely satisfying ride. Plus, it's nice to get a change of scenery from my bike rides back home.
While some of the roads have been nicely repaved since my last ride here in 2015, some of them are still a jacked-up patchwork of old pot holes covered in band-aid-like lumpy patches of asphalt, which makes for a bumpy ride at times.
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| Here's a map of the route, just starting and ending in the center of Podrečany. |
Riding Tony's carbon frame bike was interesting. My main road bike back home has a modern lightweight steel frame with a carbon fork, but Tony's all-carbon frame is lighter and more rigid, which makes for improved pedaling efficiency (the increased rigidity means more of your pedaling energy is transferred directly from you through the pedals to the road, so you theoretically go a wee bit faster). I may have to seriously consider carbon the next time I get another road bike.
Yet Another Day Trip to Banská Bystrica
Continuing with our theme of doing the exact same crap as the last trip, we did yet another day trip to Banská Bystrica. Part of our reason for returning here was to try that amazing ice cream shop again, Moja Srdcovka, which I mentioned in this post from our 2022 trip, and which I'm happy to report is still outstanding.
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| Moja Srdcovka, the excellent ice cream shop in Banská Bystrica. |
We had planned on doing a short three-night trip to Prague this week, but we had to cancel it, and I'll be honest and admit that I was skeptical it would actually happen in the first place. We were going to go with Simon and Terezia's mom so that she could help us a bit with Simon. However, Terezia's mom has been having issues with her back lately and has been feeling generally exhausted and drained, and she basically wasn't sure if she felt up to going. So that coupled with a serious heat wave in the forecast this week, with temps predicted to soar well into the 90s, made us decide that it just wasn't the right time to go.
The other thing, of course, is that Simon is only six. He's still a little kid, and he has barrels of energy, yet gets wiped out after walking around for long stretches of time (especially in the heat), and we probably would've spent an inordinate amount of time at different playgrounds around the city so he could get his ya-yas out. He's not quite old enough to fully appreciate the experience of visiting a city like Prague, and while I'm sure there would be things there he would like (e.g., riding on trams, looking at the castle and any old medieval towers, checking out play structures, and eating ice cream), it would nevertheless be a very trying few days, and the heat wave would have only exacerbated that (none of us do well in extreme heat).
So, we plan on doing shorter, more manageable day trips this time, and perhaps we'll stay in Bratislava a bit longer than we originally planned. And that brings us back to Banská Bystrica.
On the main square, Simon got sopping wet running through the water mister, a big arch-shaped device that shoots mists of water at you as you walk through it. We practically had to tear him away from the thing.
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| Simon and Terezia in the water mister. |
We did manage to check out a few things that we hadn't seen before. We decided to go and poke around in the city's main cemetery, which is located along a fairly steep slope just on the other side of the old town's castle from the main square. It's a visually striking cemetery, situated on a steep hill with lots of big old trees providing ample shade.
I tried to impart to Simon why the surrounding architecture was so special, and he seems to get it. We almost went up into the tall, slender clock tower on the main square at his behest, but he changed his mind once we got in line for it.
We also went to check out the Slovak National Museum again, which Simon mainly likes so he can board the small WWII-era cargo/transport plane that's on the grass out in front.
While I still maintain that Banská Štiavnica has Bystrica beat for sheer beauty, Banská Bystrica is nevertheless a nice, attractive, and not-too-far-away place to escape to when you're getting antsy from the mundane (and sometimes sad) village life in Podrečany. It's nice to bask in those lovely old facades and to just see lots of different random people walking up and down the streets. Plus, it's always nice, for me at least, to revisit some of these places that I like so as to re-experience them but also hopefully discover new things that we missed on prior visits.
Swimming at Hotel Aquatermal Near Dolná Strehová
I mentioned above that we've been hit with a heat wave this week, so we decided for Simon's sake that we'd look for some places to swim. We checked out the popular Hotel Aquatermal, which locals simply refer to as "Dolná Strehová," which is the name of a nearby village. It's located about 15 miles south of Podrečany, fairly close to the Hungarian border.
Hotel Aquatermal is not just some local pool; it's a fairly large facility with six different outdoor pools, a tangle of water slides, and an entire indoor area with more pools and thermal spas. We didn't go into the indoor facility, but the six outdoor pools include a large regular pool for grownups; a one-meter-deep kids pool for smaller kids who know how to swim or at least stay afloat; two nicely heated thermal pools—one with powerful, soothing jets all along the outer edge, like a large hot tub, and another with no jets; a super-shallow kiddie pool (which, weirdly, adults are not allowed to go into to accompany their toddlers); and another pool for younger kids that's much smaller than the first.
A few large, serpentine water slides spill into the larger adult pool, while one medium-sized serpentine slide and two smaller slides spill into the larger kids pool.
The pools are surrounded by spacious, sloping grassy fields with trees here and there. There are stacks of molded plastic chaise lounge chairs that people grab and drag to a free spot on the grass so they can sunbathe or lie in the shade. We each grabbed a lounge chair and dragged them to a shady spot beneath a tree, but we never even used them as we were in the water pretty much the entire time. Nevertheless, I was super annoyed when I came back to check on our stuff to find that someone had made off with one of our lounge chairs! (All of our stuff was still there, though.) There were still stacks of them available at the edge of the lawn, so someone was just being lazy.
One edge of the premises is lined with serious food and drink options–not just snacks and soda, but full-on hot/cooked lunch-menu meals and beer and other beverages.
Simon spent nearly the entire time in the larger kids pool, and he gleefully went down one of the smaller water slides at that pool dozens of times. He's enrolled in swimming lessons back home, and while he is still far from mastering his swimming strokes, he's able to do a combination of freestyle and dog paddling, so he can stay afloat and he's quite comfortable in the water.
I spent as much time as I could in the heated thermal pool with the jets, positioning myself so the jets were blasting my lower back and sometimes my neck and shoulders. I could spend all day in there. Yes, the average age of the folks in the thermal pool was probably around 70 (lots of old men in Speedos with bowling ball bellies and gaggles of gossiping older woman with oddly colored hair), but I didn't care—it felt great.
But this is by no means some geriatric facility. Lots of parents our age and younger were there with kids of varying ages, and it looked like a few classes of younger elementary-aged kids were there on end-of-year school field trips. (The Slovak elementary school year isn't quite over yet on June 21.) I also heard nearly as much Hungarian being spoken as Slovak—no surprise given its proximity to the Hungarian border, not to mention the greater prevalence of Hungarian-speaking people in southern Slovakia.
We generally prefer to swim in natural bodies of water (rivers, lakes, or calm ocean beaches), so we probably wouldn't go to a place like this if we had no kids. But this was a good local spot to take a young kid on a sweltering hot day.
Hotel Aquatermal, as the name indicates, is also a hotel. Yes, people actually stay in places like this for days at a time. There is also a dense network of little cottages and cabins surrounding the facility, where people can stay and camp out of.
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| The front of Hotel Aquatermal. |
Full-day entry plus lunch (and ice cream) came to about 24 euros per person. Not terrible when you consider the lunches were full-on hot/cooked Slovak meals served at tables. We got there around 10:00 am and left around 3:00 pm, so we didn't take advantage of the full-day access we paid for, as frankly it was starting to get a little boring (though not in Simon's opinion). There are cheaper options where you can pay for either two or three hours, but we weren't sure how long we'd want to spend there, so we opted for the full-day option to be safe. I think a three-hour option would work.
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| Hungarian goulash, a hearty lunch at Aquatermal, apparently designed to weigh you down like a boat anchor when you get back in the pool. |
The drive there and back was typically picturesque—all of it being winding two-lane country roads that snake through several remote, weathered villages and large swaths of forest and/or rolling fields.
Would we go out of our way to a place like this? No. But it's a good place to go with kids on super-hot summer days. Could get pricey if you were doing this all the time, though, and it's probably much more crowded on weekends and once summer is in full swing for everyone.
