Headwinds in Hungary

This is a very spontaneous trip.  We really had no more than vague plans for where we were going to go after Czech, other than that we wanted to stay in Eastern Europe and end somewhere in Croatia.   So after Vienna we decided to head east to Slovakia and Hungary, more to avoid the expensive Euro prices in Austria than anything else.  (Ed. note:  we are currently in Slovenia, which to our disappointment is also on the Euro.  Blast.  Guess we should have read the guidebook instead of just carting it around like deadweight.)  We'd kind of hoped to head all the way to Budapest before turning south, but our plans were thwarted by lack of time.  We did manage to roll into Hungary in good time on amazing tailwinds that had us cruising at 35 km/h, but turning southwest was a bit of a different story.  Hungary is amazingly flat (at least the part we saw), amazingly hot (it may or may not have been a heat wave; we couldn't quite get the story straight), and amazingly windy... in the wrong direction if you're headed west.  Three days of fighting headwinds in tight peleton styles (pack-riding) was enough for us.  We are now in the hills of Slovenia and gloriously happy.  It even rained for a whole day!  (Only the second day of rain in 3 weeks, crazy.)  I was cold for the first time in as long as I can remember!!  So happy!

Hungary, according to the first sentence in our guidebook, is "more than goulash, wine, and thermal baths."  Goulash!  Wine!  And thermal spas?  What the?!  We definitely hadn't heard about these...  And so our mission began.  Our three days in Hungary were spent drinking wine, sitting in hot mineral baths (actually part of our campsite!  - now that's convenient), and searching for goulash.   This proved trickier than expected, especially since we've become quite accustomed to our nightly meal of veggie pasta and can't quite break the ritual or fork over the money for a restaurant meal.   We decided our last day in Hungary had to be Goulash Day.  We had it all planned out - spend lunchtime in town, find a nice little restaurant, bust out the wallets, and pick one of the surely multiple goulashes on the menu.  No dice.  We instead spent all our time and energy getting new bottom brackets for Allan's and my bikes, and rolled out of town without goulash.  That night our luck turned even worse when we arrived at the campsite marked on our map, only to find out that it was a youth camp and had no camping.  But then, get this...  the owner came out, spoke perfect English, offered us the forest as a secluded campground, and said (no joke), "Um, would you care for a dinner of Hungarian goulash?"  Success!  We had a tasty soupy goulash, hot Hungarian paprika, and a bottle of white wine on the house.  We even had a game of basketball with the teenagers before bed.  Hungary... not so shabby.