2018: Next Leg Starts

We leave in 1 ½ days and we are not ready.  How did the time disappear in the last few weeks.  Apologies for not being able to visit our friend just out of hospital.  A special good-bye to Jan and Charleigh who land back in Canada 1 hour after we depart.  We could have arranged that a little better.

Mike and I bought tickets to return to Europe the first week of February.  Once we were home we decided to delay that one month.  It turned out that the change fee to modify our tickets would cost more than buying new ones so the old ones simply got thrown out.  I say simply but it actually felt kind of awful.  We have managed a better routing with the new tickets which is nice.  We depart Friday evening, flying into London, UK first.  We will be visiting my Aunt near London for lunch on the day we arrive.  I will make a great impression as I don’t sleep on planes and 24 hours without sleep looks worse on me now that it used to.  We will hopefully meet a cousin of mine for lunch on Sunday.  We leave at some awful hour Monday morning so that we can arrive back at our motorhome during daylight hours.  When we get back we need to unwinterize the motorhome.  We need to try and get rid of the poisonous anti-freeze that is in the drinking water system, hook up batteries, fill up (and empty and fill again) with water.  A lot to be done as we will start living in it the day we arrive.

According to Google Budapest is -8⁰ C at this moment and Toronto is +16⁰ C.  That is a 24⁰ C or 44⁰ F temperature difference.  Are we going the wrong way??

I don’t often modify these blogs after I write them but I need to add something I just found out.  Apparently Europe is currently experiencing weather from Siberia they are calling the “Beast from the East”.  So far 12 people have died in this weather.  We stop in London first.  Have a look at the picture below.

We can’t thank our hosts in Budapest, Joska and Jutka, enough.  They fed us, entertained us, gave our car and motorhome a home for much longer than was originally arranged.  They took us to the Budapest airport when we left and are picking us up when we arrive back in Budapest.  All of this with no language at all in common between us.  How generous people are.

As usual we don’t have specific plans, but we do have a general direction in mind.  For this leg we plan to head fairly quickly down to Croatia.  I have wanted to go into Montenegro, which looks lovely, for quite a while.  It turns out that our European insurance, which is minimal at best, isn’t valid in Montenegro which means you can’t drive across the border.  I read that you can buy temporary insurance at the border which we might look into.  As usual, we will take it as it comes and figure it out enroute.

Everyone we have talked to who has been to Croatia has loved it.  It looks like we are supposed to stay in campgrounds there which is too bad as I really do like “wild camping” but we will probably meet more people in campgrounds.  Mike and I are not really “campers” even though we travel in a motorhome.  We are also not ones for sitting outside.  We don’t do it at home and we don’t do it when we travel.  I am going to try real hard to change that a little.  To start, as soon as the weather improves I would like Mike and I, even if it is only for 15 – 30 minutes, to sit outside and have a drink or read a book or something.  I expect to meet even more people this way and then we can all go inside and have a drink ?.  As mentioned previously, meeting, learning about and talking in detail with the people we meet is a highlight of our travels.

After Croatia we will head north.  I met a lady today from Dubvronik who highly recommended going into parts of Bosnia which I had never thought of.  We will check into it when we get there.  We expect to spend more time in Hungary.   At some point I would like to stay in Transylvania for a while.  After that everything is dependent on the weather, what time of year it is etc.  We may spend months in Austria or we might not get there for another year.  The same with Czech and all the countries in that part of the world.  The map at the top basically outlines the areas that we can see ourselves possibly visiting in 2018.  We certainly won’t get to all of them.  It will probably be another week or so before I post again, after we our back in Europe and settled down a little.

Our apologies to all the friends that we didn’t see this trip home and thanks to everyone who found the time to visit us while we were in Canada.  Bye for now.