Sof Away!

So we left Sofie in Budapest yesterday, secure in the hands of a dodgy looking hippy who took her into a dark unsigned apartment building up an almost derelict lift and into a tiny room guarded by an iron gate with a shonky lock. I'm sure she's fine.

We had a lot of fun on the weekend though, after getting the hire car and sending our car to the mechanic's on Saturday, we headed out for a bit of a road trip on Sunday. It seems that Sofie hadn't much experience handling a manual transmission previously, so we decided that she should do most of the driving. She took up the challenge easily, going from asking what each pedal did to driving through the twisty roads in the small country towns (which is harder than it sounds, considering all the horse drawn carts) and cruising down the freeway at 130km/h. She was changing gears like a champ.

Our first stop of the day was my personal favourite town in Hungary: Eger. We've been there previously but its well worth seeing again. The city is so pretty and of course you can never go too wrong with some castle exploration. We climbed the bastions, walked the castle walls and viewed the city. We also seemed to get lost at some point and wandered into a strange art exhibition that was sponsored by a push bike manufacturer. Every piece of art had a bicycle powered dynamo light pointed at it. It was classy and we loved it. Once we left the castle, we made our way down the cobbled streets and had lunch at a quaint little restaurant.

The GPS then sent us over one of the few mountains in Hungary. A small one lane road with plenty of blind corners. As much as I love driving up and down mountains, and I do, why does the GPS seem to go out of its way to find every goat track between here and anywhere and decide that it'd be an awesome way to go? Anyway, I was driving, so Amanda lost some hair and Sofie caught up on some sleep but we made it to our next destination. The cave-baths of Miskolc-Tapolca. We love this place, and if anyone is planning to come over and see us then make sure you bring your bathers as we're going to take any excuse to visit. Unfortunately, our mountain trekking took longer than expected so we only had an hour to explore before we were chased out of the cave by bears with whistles (Note: They might not have been bears, they might have been lifeguards).

On Monday we jumped back in the car, Sofie leading the charge, and took ourselves to Budapest. It took most of the day to get there, but we had the afternoon to explore the palace areas of Buda before it got too dark and we had to go home. We discovered a few new areas that we hadn't seen before including an awesome church that I'm going to call Mattias Church. That shall be its name. By the time we got back to the hotel, we had time for a relaxed dinner then went to bed.

Like all good stories we begin and end with a dodgy looking hippy. Sofie seemed to be quite accepting of the new accommodation that we led her to the next day and we've since recieved emails showing that she survived the experience. It seems like she's had an awesome amount of fun on her trip and it certainly sounds like she's got some great things coming up. We can't wait to hear about the dog sledding in Norway!

It was great to see ya, Sof!

- Daniel