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.