We had a late start on Saturday, given the excesses of the night before in downtown Žilina. After much slowness and general inability to get our arses in gear, we finally set off for Bojnice Castle, a gem of a place that looks like your archetypal fairytale castle a couple of hours south towards the centre of the country.

We just managed to squeeze in to the last tour of the day (this being naff weather season, the tours stop at 3pm), and still have time to buy some (very mediocre) langos - garlic-soaked potato pancake type things - to munch on. I was feeling rather the worse for wear, despite sleeping in the back of the car most of the way there - and thereby missing the highrise highlights of the concrete nastiness that is the nearby town of Prievidza. Shame.

After a pleasant tour of the castle in Slovak (we had a brief dodgily translated handout in English) we moved on to a health spa and associated salt cave down the road in the town of Bojnice. I had a full-body massage for 20 minutes with a strange-looking man who spoke less English than I did Slovak (our conversation didn't really ever threaten to get beyond "Football! Aah! Chelsea!"; although to be fair that's about all I could say in English about football too).

We didn't bother with the salt cave, because basically it's just a cave with salt walls where the air has a salty tang like being at the seaside; this is probably a novel experience for Slovaks, but hardly new for us. So we just had tea and biscuits instead.

Then we made our way further south to another health spa at Sklene Teplice, this one with a natural spring in an underground cave. Gareth didn't bring his cossie, so it was just me & Jo that went in. Also, because we arrived so late, there was no chance of another massage, but hey ho.

Jo managed to faint and crack her lip open quite badly after we got out of the hot waters, which was a bit nasty, but she soldiered on and drove us to our next stop, which was a restaurant in the middle of nowhere that serves outlandish meat dishes: bear, wild boar, chamois, that sort of thing, with healthy portions of dumplings.

It was really rather late by this time, but we were undeterred and made the most of our longish journey back to Žilina by stopping for a midnight meander through the beautiful mediaeval town of Kremnice - which was deathly silent, something a town in western Europe would never ever ever be on a Saturday night - and then in the hideously ugly town of Martin - which truly rivals Coventry's windswept concrete plazas and bleak ring roads.

Finally, after NOT stopping at the local Hell's Angels bar off the motorway, we returned to Jo's historic pub (it really is in all the local history books; Jo showed us) called Drevenica, or Wooden House. A long day but it was worth it. And Jo's cat was glad to see us back again too.

On Sunday, Jo cooked us ham & eggs for breakfast in the restaurant downstairs. Then we went to the nearby town of Tepli?ka nad Váhom for a walk. The weather had changed overnight, and there were shafts of sunlight glinting off the piles of dirty snow at the sides of the road. Blue sky! So long a stranger this winter, at last it was visible again.

We stopped for lunch in a delicious restaurant perched on a little island in a lake. The seafood was great and the beer delightful. The restaurant was very tastefully decorated in solid woods and had a very Austrian feel to it (at least for me), down to the fact that the waiter looked like my relatives in the Waldviertel!

In the afternoon we accompanied Jo to the viewing of a house near her pub that she might buy. It was one of her regular customers that showed us around; we were of course obliged to visit his house nearby and drink schnaps. It was mindblowing!! So good!! I haven't had as tasty a home-made schnaps as that in many a long year. Apple based, it was full of flavour and delicate at the same time. Wow.

We headed back to Drevenica for several beers and an evening of supreme amusement in the bar. The guy who showed us round the house brought his guitar to the bar and started singing lilting tunes with all the sweet sadness of fifty years of a hard life. Soon he was joined by the other men in the bar, and thus ensued a night of live entertainment that happens only rarely, Jo told us. We were truly honoured. And I took about three million photos of everybody in the bar, because there were some real characters there that night!

Drunk as skunks several hours later (well at least Gareth & I were), the three of us did a midnight run to the out-of-town Tesco to buy the restaurant's weekly shop. I've never ever bought so much in one go in a supermarket - and believe you me, I've had some blow-outs in supermarkets in my time! It was mad. But the maddest thing was the barely-suppressed anger of everyone in the queue behind us at the one open till as Jo started paying for the shopping with Luncheon Vouchers, of which it took some 100 to be individually scanned in! Oh dear.

And there we were, at the end of our Slovakian adventure. Jo dropped me & Gareth off at the railway station the next morning and we caught a train to Vienna.

In Vienna we stopped for lunch at the Naschmarkt, marvelling at the art nouveau gorgeousness of the buildings on the market's northern side as we devoured massive piles of XXXL Schnitzel and potato salad, supping on Czech Budweiser. Ah, the pleasures of central Europe! The weather was balmy; there was no snow to be seen anywhere. We had to take our jackets off, it was so hot.

We had a coffee and a final chat, and then Gareth walked with me to Westbahnhof, where I jumped in a train that would take me all the way back to Munich. He made his way to the airport to fly home.

Gareth was there at the beginning of my travels, way back in May 2003 when we drove together to Amsterdam, and here he was at the end of my travels, almost three years on. A pleasure indeed.

The next day, Gareth & I had another leisurely breakfast courtesy of Michael's kitchen (Michael having already left to go to work), then made our way to Südbahnhof to catch a train to Slovakia.

Bratislava used to be linked to Vienna by a tram line, and there's talk of reinstating the service - it's only 45km after all - but for now the train takes over an hour and goes a very circuitous route through the beginnings of the Steppe (vast flatness stretching away into the east; there be Magyars). However, soon enough you're back in the hilly lands north of the Danube.

We wandered aimlessly around Bratislava, taking care to note the way back to the station for later. The city is like a small Vienna in many respects. Actually, thinking about it, it reminds me more of Passau. Same river, opposite side of Austria. Hm. There's lots of renovation going on, and I dare say many a Euro is pouring in now that Slovakia is a fully-fledged member of the EU.

Lunch was reasonable, with delicious beer (I had a dark Krusovice which I haven't had since Sydney - yum!) in a dark but by no means dreary little place right in the old town. We walked off the calories around town, stopping to buy a gift for Gareth's friend who would be putting us up at our next port of call, before heading back out to the station.

My poor attempt at speaking Slovak in the station (having mastered the phrase "two first-class return tickets to Žilina please", I failed utterly to understand the reply, as predicted) nevertheless got us our onward tickets, so we retrieved our luggage from the consignes (where the bloke spoke perfect English) and found our train with only a minute to spare. The next few hours passed without incident, the only notable occurrence being the sudden reduction in speed when we moved from the EU-funded nice new track to the presumably Soviet-era trundly bit about an hour out of Bratislava.

And then there we were in Žilina. We had to jump down out of our carriage onto the tracks because the platform wasn't long enough to accommodate the whole train, and then wander down to the station building avoiding snowy puddles. On the platform we were met by Jo, Gareth's schoolfriend who has been mad enough to buy herself a Slovak pub & restaurant in a small town with no tourist trade to speak of. And what a lovely girl she is!!

So she drove us to her madcap hostelry, where we were assailed by noxious clouds of cigarette smoke, the drone of Slovak sport commentary on the telly and the suspicious glances of ordinary working men. It was utterly bizarre!! We soon got chatting to a few of her regulars, however, and before long we were best buddies (Slovak beer isn't bad actually). We were even treated to a traditional Slovak proverb: "Beer, smoked pork and mothers-in-law are at their best when they're cold"!

Friday was our first full day in Slovakia. We walked into town with Jo to visit her accountant (strange though it may seem, Jo is actually making a profit on her business, after months and months of constantly being ripped off because she's a foreigner and a woman to boot), then carried on into the historic heart of Žilina.

It's a surprisingly pretty little town: the beautiful colonnaded main square at the top of the hill has churches and stately buildings facing into a green area (actually it was white with the snow), whilst the roads leading up to the hill are twisty and mediaeval, full of little shops and architectural details. At the base of the hill, somewhat prosaically, is a huge Tesco supermarket, but then this is the price of progress.

We had coffee and cake in a delightful little coffee & cake shop on the main square that was recommended to us by Jo's waitress, then popped into the Irish pub (yes, they really are everywhere) next door and had a quick beer before lunch. Well, it WAS St Patrick's day! Then we walked back to Jo's and had a late lunch of borshch, chatting to Jo's waitress Eva before her evening shift.

That evening Jo & I both had a massage at a beauty clinic in town (the girl wasn't too bad but she didn't put her back into it in my opinion). It was a bit weird having no way of talking to the person who has got her hands all over you, but I just lay there and took it.

Then Gareth & I (later joined by Jo after her massage) had beers in what was clearly a locals-only bar, judging by the looks we got from the staff and clientèle. The barman was most strange, and refused to understand our request for beer, instead fetching over one of his regular clients and using him as a translator. They were all a bit surly looking, to be honest, but the beer was very tasty so we put up with the unfriendly service until a second round had been consumed.

We entered a Greek restaurant on the main square, sat down and were given menus, but we couldn't get served because the kitchen was going to be closing in 20 minutes' time. I ask you! And I thought German customer service was lacking. So instead we went to a pizza place, also on the main square, where we were overwhelmed by the pleasantness of the waitress and the buzz of the place in general. Next to us were two (East) Germans, who were on business here (there's a big Korean car factory in town, with suppliers from all over central Europe, which has brought recent prosperity).

Our next stop was the Irish bar again - well it WAS St Patrick's day - where the three most amusing things were the very gay leather armbands they were giving away (branded with the Guinness harp, of course), the astonished looks Gareth & I got from the locals when we were able to sing along to practically all the songs that were played, and the fact that I ended up drinking most of everyone's beer (everyone being me, Gareth & Jo, not the whole pub!) because I'm such a hardened drinker in comparison with those two lightweights.

We waddled home at an ungodly hour and had some of the local firewater called borovi?ka, which tastes rather like sweet gin, before turning in for the night.