A Road Trip

We spent the best part of the last 4 days with a hired car at our disposal, a crappy little gutless number, but a car none the less. We were armed with the name of a town that my grandmother was to have grown up in. Awesome, except she doesn't live in Heves, like we were told, so after arriving at this - lets me be completely honest here - quite an uninteresting and uninspiring town of 12,000 people we were a little dismayed by the whole situation. Lucky for us we decided that we'd go for a nice drive and see how things turned out; we ended up going to Hevesvezkeny where we stumbled across a building that fit the criteria: 1. her house has now been turned into a pub (so we had a beer) and 2. there would be stalks nesting on top of the telegraph poles. Tick, tick. Also thanks to Lachie for showing me his photos we were able to recognise the place. It's nothing special to look at, but another puzzle piece to the Hodi family history.


So here we are driving away into the country side feeling pretty amazed that we found this place with no address in the middle of a foreign country when our little car hits a pot hole and we get a flat tyre 'ha ha ha', we laugh to ourselves, 'you cannot stop us, we are master travellers' I thought as Jeremy made possibly the fastest tyre change in history. Boy, was I wrong, next thing we realise is that the hazard lights have flattened the battery (I know how stupid is that). We trekked into the horrible, uninspiring town of Heves, that now was an annoying 3km away, where we tried every combination to call the Emergency line without success. We ended up walking back to a little backyard garage service and talking to a guy who made us wait for 15mins and then he and his friend got into a car and told us to get into the back. Lets just say that at this point we were totally at the mercy of 2 country mechanic, one being able to speak a little broken English, the other seeming to laugh at us at every opportunity (them: 'what car?' us:'Suzuki Splash' them: 'asojhsdfhajklasfd HA HA HA lkjhaslkdjh HA HA HA'). But they checked out battery, jump started our car and talked to the emergency line and organised for us to have a car transfer at a local petrol station in 2 hours time. Gold. Except we sat there for 4 hours and about 3 hours into the waiting, one of the mechanics pulled up and as we're sitting in the (broken) car he is making small talk and as we're thinking, we've been set up for something horrible here, in the end Norbit wanted our email address so his sons could practice English. It all works out in the end I say!

Eger was our destination and well worth it, we had a nice camping spot (thought we'd test out our crappy Tesco tent before Exit music festival) and just around the corner there was 'The Valley of Beautiful Women' which had nothing to do with chicks and everything to do with wine, cheap Hungarian wine, a glass typically cost 250Ft which works out at the whopping price of $1.50. They even do this thing where you can fill an empty water bottle for about $6, some was good, some was bad. We spent an extended afternoon drinking with a lovely girl from Quebec named Fred. Then the next night too.

We've had a great time in Hungary it's been really nice to see different parts of the country, but next up is the Exit Music Festival in Novi Sad in Serbia, the festival itself is going to be awesome, but we're especially looking forward to meeting up with Mr Tommy Acocks.