20 July ’04, Tuesday. It’s been a couple of days since I wrote, and I just want you to know that it wasn’t the “Bull’s Blood” (wine) that was the reason. Louise and I never did make it to “Sirens Valley” together. We met Steve and Sue from the UK and Steve came by with a 2 liter bottle to have it filled in the “Valley”. Well, Louise and I have always gotten rid of our bottles because they were empty and we didn’t have any other use for them….we thought !!! Steve set us straight on that. Fortunately for us, Steve and Sue had a 4 liter that they could use and they gave us the 2. It wasn’t too long and Steve and I set foot into the “Valley” for some wine tasting and selecting our choice of vino for our personal “cellar”.
After making our choice and getting back to the van, Steve, Sue, Louise and I decided that we should do a little sampling of our 2 liter and before you knew it, we had consumed the whole bottle. Instead of moving on to theirs we decided to go for dinner (wise choice). As it was, we had a great time at dinner with Steve and Sue. After dragging ourselves out of bed in the morning, each of us packed up to move onto our next locations. Having exchanged email addresses and promising to keep in touch, we pulled out. By the way, they have been on the road traveling Europe and North Africa for the past year and a little more. Steve and Sue will be “wintering” in Morocco this winter with some New Zealanders that they met last year at one of their campgrounds. Louise and I headed up North a few km to Szilvasvarad. It is in the Bukk Hills and has a narrow gage railway. The next day it took us up 5 km to the trail of the Istallosko Cave. This is a huge historic cave that was up a very steep trail. When we arrived we wondered just why they couldn’t have found a much lower place to have lived than at the top. This campsite was really quite nice. It was quiet, had a nice view, large individual pitches, and a pretty good restaurant. One of the fun things, was having breakfast at the restaurant and we couldn’t speak or read the Hungarian language and the lady who was the waitress and the cook couldn’t understand us at all either. Even when we pointed at something on the menu it just didn’t seem to click with her what we wanted with the exception that we were able to order ham and eggs (could be that that was all she had or all she could cook). Well after 2 nights we decided to move more north. We had thought of going on to the Black Sea, but after a little discussion and reasoning we heading north to Slovenia (about 45 km to the border). Our chosen campsite was going to be about 4 hours drive north and north east to a lake just outside of Michalovce. Tomorrow….more on our beach front site just ourside of Michalovce