A whole day on the motorway. The vignettes pay off, it's busy, but we make good time. There's nothing to see of beautiful Austria, snow, rain, grey in grey.
Linz, Vienna and later Bratislava We leave it to one side, but remember the wonderful time we had there. It wasn't so long ago that we were able to enjoy the autumn sun there.
We cross the border into Hungary in the dark, but we don't like driving in the dark. You can't see anything of the landscape, the pitches are harder to find and anyway, when it gets dark, we belong in the nest.
After 5 hours on the motorway, I have time to prepare us for Hungary. I read out a travel guide, buy a 10-day vignette for our Felix online, which is called a "weekly subscription", and look for an internet provider.
As soon as we cross the border, we head for a phone shop in the first town whose name we can't pronounce. Just like in Slovakia, we expect days of registration, apps that don't work in English and opaque subscription models.
But Hungary surprises us with its modernity. Within 10 minutes we have a SIM card in our WLAN box. 1 GB of data to start with and already activated. We are thrilled. The accompanying app is quickly installed and I click around wildly, just can't read anything. Here, too, the employee helps me quickly and switches to English. Not all the texts are translated, but I manage. And my wild clicking around even won me a day of free internet. How I managed to do this remains a mystery to me, however.
We arrive in Budapest late in the evening and immediately find a nice pitch on the Danube. In the centre of Budapest, right next to the Gellertbad. We fall into bed dead tired.
Just as well, because around 5 o'clock in the morning, the quiet banks of the Danube turn into a major traffic artery. And every time a car drives past, the slush splashes against Felix. It really isn't much fun.
Gerd decides to go back to sleep. I get up, light the candle and incense burner and read. Gerd's rumbling makes me realise that he can't sleep with the street noise, of course, but he doesn't want to get up either. All right, let's see how the day turns out, it could end up being another long afternoon nap.
But then we'll have to choose a better place for our little house.
Merci for "travelling with us
We are thinking about taking another break from travelling in the summer and visiting our families in Germany and Switzerland. One of the ideas is to organise a Lecture about our long journey to the Persian Gulf to prepare. If you would like to, what would interest you the most? We will also tell stories here that don't find a place here on the blog. We're thinking of the Bern and Berlin area - simply because we have family there. But other places are also conceivable. Feel free to write to us.
Do you think our travel experiences might be of interest to others? Then you can share the Share post quietly. By e-mail or however you want to do it.
In addition, if you haven't already done so, you can use our Newsletter subscribe. Here you will receive all our experiences in your mailbox whenever we publish something new or once a week on Fridays: live-pur.ch/newsletter
We are also very happy to hear your views, your tips or your questions. Just comment on the post!
