Weather: ☀️🌤️☀️🌤️☀️
Picnic: 🥪🥪 (2 out 5, bread at the supermarket in Lubina. The spot we chose was shabby and made us feel like hobo’s)
Track: 🇸🇰🇸🇰🇸🇰🇸🇰 (4 out of 5, pretty forest trail down the Slovakian hills, great views and cool castle at Visnové)
Campsite: ⛺⛺⛺⛺ (4 out of 5, flat spot with benches and a shelter next to a small river.)
Name of followed trail: E8 (blue, green and yellow markers)
We enjoy a good breakfast at the hut and leave around 9.00. We start with a long descent to a small village, and then up to a SNP memorial and down into Lubina. The town looks a bit more friendly than Brezová pod Bradlom, but when we sit down on the pavement outside the supermarket and a shabby looking man with 2 bottles of beer in his hand comes to sit there too, we kind of feel like we found the local hobo hangout…
We continue our walk on an easy track towards Visnové. There we have a nice long break at a café, enjoying a large, cold Kofola.
After a good rest, we continue for our last 5 km. These go steep up the hill to the ruins of Cachtice castle, a castle build around 1260 and once home of Elizabeth Bathory, apparently infamous for her torturous practices. After realizing that this is another part of European history we know absolutely nothing about (need to google some more…), we continue our walk down again. We walk a pretty grassy trail, through a field with wildflowers and great views over the mountains around us. The trail crosses a road and follows a small river, until we get to a picnic spot with a shelter. This is our destination for today. We get here around 17.00, so we have plenty of time to wash in the river, relax on the bench and make dinner.
After that we get into the tent and listen to some music and read a book. No reception here whatsoever, so no historical background information on Elizabeth, or other questions we have had during the day.