Sorry for the 3 day blog absence, but that was a bit of an epic road trip and I enjoyed the disconnectedness, had some true back to nature moments, and widened my experience of the world a bit, so it’s all good, and I come back to realize that nothing much has changed in the world of the news, so my commentary on it was pretty unnecessary anyway.
Isabel was staying at her friend’s family’s cottage, and we were scheduled to go pick her up 4 or 5 days from now, but she got sick so we went early. (she’s fine)
The cottage is in a small village in the Carpathian mountains, in the southwestern corner of Ukraine, near the Romanian and Hungarian borders. It is a region of bad roads and beautiful scenery. It is a town with a stream running through it that they call a river, a church with a blinding gold dome, and homes which not all of them are even accessible by road – we arrived at 3 o’clock in the morning, and J–‘s grandmother and uncle were waiting for us at the last point we could get the car to, and from there we walked across a bridge which was some planks laid across a well rusted framework, and up a path from there.
The next day we took a brief tour of the town and then in the afternoon walked up the mountain for a picnic. If I took a walk like that everyday, I’d be fit in no time.
We picked up some friends of theirs along the way, who had pigs and chickens and a shed for smoking meat, it looked like an old outhouse, not a complicated process at all, actually, and proceeded upwards.
After a couple of hours, we reached the picnic spot, made a fire, roasted some sausages, and enjoyed the view, mountains with forests running down the sides like dripping paint, and J’s mother pointed out to me which mountains were actually in Romania.
Yesterday was an epic drive home. We waited at the border 4 hours, it’s been a long time since I’ve had that experience, spoiled by living in the E.U., and then stopped in Budapest, walked down to the river and we were there for a fireworks show, feast of St. Stephen or something like that, massive crowds, annoying traffic, I was actually kind of relieved when we got out of there, had to stop and sleep at a rest stop in Slovakia at about 3 in the morning because even Helena, who has an amazing talent for long distance driving, had reached her limit, and got back home at about 9 this morning.
www.gurukalehuru.com 