Road to Krakow (Bosnia, Croatia, Hungary)

Picking up where I left off on our Eastern European family vacation:
Our next two days of vacation were spent driving, driving, and driving. After leaving Sarajevo, Bosnia, we once again entered back into Croatia, where we took a slow, but beautiful drive through the mountians and into Hungary. In the beginning, we weren’t really sure we were on the right road, because our GPS didn’t have a very good map of the area, and kept telling us we were off route. The sparsly populated mountain road was beautiful and almost felt like we were back home in Colorado! As we did encounter little pockets of civilization, it was soo cute and quaint. It reminded me of the scenes from the book, Heidi. I imagined these mountain folk never leaving their little villages. Some funny things we encountered along the way: An old man, walking his cow down the road, a woman washing her clothes in a big tub in her front yard, lots of old old cemetaries, some Christian and some Muslim, lots of milk cows wandering around on and off the road, an older lady herding sheep and goats, a man raking his hay into cute little hay stacks., the police officer, giving Pete a ticket for driving without our lights on (oops! Even without a common language you can still get a ticket and we had to pay for it on the spot! He was very nice about it though!) Then there was this little old lady who stepped out into the road in front of us and flagged us down, holding out her passport and jabbering away to us. We had no idea what she needed, so we just gave her some money, and kept going. She didn’t act like that is what she needed, but took it anyway. I think she was trying to get a ride. I kicked myself for not getting her picture after we drove off, because she truly looked like a witch! Warts, big nose, and all, and she was dressed in some interesting clothes which were mostly black. We saw lots and lots of police officers, Eventually another officer flagged us down for speeding (we didn’t know the speed limit since it wasn’t posted) and right at the moment that we were trying to play the dumb foreigner, Paul, as if on cue, began throwing up in the back seat. Pete jumped out and I was scrambling to find napkins. I guess the officer finally decided that we weren’t worth his trouble after all that and just waived us to continue on once we had gotten the mess cleaned up. It was a stroke of good luck for us, or maybe a blessing from God, because Paul never complained or got sick again after words. We spent the night in a little bed and breakfast in Hungary. The innkeeper spoke no English, but he and his wife knew a little Italian, so we were able to get by. They were really friendly and sweet and picked two bags of plumbs and 1 bag of tomatoes for us to take with us on our trip. We had wanted to spend some time in Budapest the next afternoon, but by the time we got there, we realized that we only had time for lunch. As you can see Paul found the joy of picture taking, and went a little crazy! Other than that we were there just long enough for us to get a parking ticket, and a beautiful view of the city from the car windows. Definitely a place that I would love to go back to. The Hungarians were very friendly people.

Lunch in Budapest.....