Tuesday, June 10 – Tata to Subotica

Our hotel in Tata last night was very interesting. The rooms were kind of oddly shaped – long and narrow - with single beds end to end. It was a little older than the other places we have been, but well-kept and very quaint in décor. They had a very good breakfast. In fact all of our hotels since the “budget” disappointment in Metz have been very nice. The big complaint is always WiFi. It is almost always tricky to get on and in Munich we could not get on at all. In fact, last night in Hungary was our best WiFi experience so far. Another interesting note is that none of the hotels here have clock-radios in the room like all North American ones do.

We began our day with a few stops in the low hills (Schildgebirge) west of Budapest. We stopped in a few villages and were making pretty good time. One disappointment was that after we had spent some time unsuccessfully checking out the cemetery in Atschau, we found an older one across the road. However, it was quite overgrown and time did not permit a close examination.

In these rural areas there are not many options for finding a place to eat, so Miles and I made a shopping excursion in a grocery store and we had a picnic on the grass beside the bus. We had to go a little out of our way to find a larger town with a supermarket and we ran into a couple of construction delays, putting us a little behind time. Then we overstayed at Kalocsa where Ray had arranged a meeting with a Hungarian speaking cousin. Then we got held up again at the border. It took half an hour just to clear the Hungarian border outbound and another three quarters at the Serbian border inbound. We finally met Stasa, our guide, at 7:45, about two hours late. We had one more stop at Gakowa, where there is a memorial over the mass grave of those who died in the post-war internment camp there. There was another site nearby that we had also planned to visit, but we had to skip it, as it was already getting dark. We finally rolled into our hotel at 10 PM.

Weather was very hot again. We were sweltering in the bus during the border delays. Other than the hills where we started out, the land was as flat as a pancake. The crops here are more advanced with the wheat already turning golden brown and soon ready for harvesting.

Yesterday we ran the gamut as far as landscape is concerned – from gently rolling plains around Munich tto small mountains near Salzburg with the main Alps to the south, back to gently rolling around Cienna, very flat plains approaching Tata, and low hills at Tata itself.