Jones

Our second attempt to leave Gursanda Park was slightly more successful. We were on the road before 9am and with one minor exception, nothing was left behind. We made good progress towards Orada our planned stopping place. As we pulled up to a roundabout a massive stone kicked up by a flail at the side of a field flew over the barrier and hit jones on the forehead.

At first we thought we’d escaped without damage – we should have known better. The stone was about the size of a golf ball and hit the windscreen – it was just out of sight. There’s also a small chip to the mercedes cab paint and a chip on the GRP above the cab.

Still, nothing to be done about it except for a lot of swearing. I tried to find the footage from the dash-cam but there’s too much to review – let’s hope I never actually need to find some dash-cam footage.

We finally took stock of the damage after lunch  – which was a pretty good ciorbă de perișoare – a thinish vegetable broth with pork dumplings. This came with mind blowingly hot pickled chillis. Hot enough to take our minds off the windscreen.

Then our goal for the day the Art Nouveaux town of Orada. Or a car park near the centre which was full. 

Wary of the experience in Bucharest  we didn’t fancy driving down back streets trying to find parking so we decided to skip Orada altogether and head for Bihar’s thermal baths where you can camp in the leafy car park. That’s right spa-checkers, we’re in Hungary again. Farewall Romania .

Sadly you’re not allowed cameras in the Spa so you’ll have to imagine us sitting up to our necks in strong black tea (Jane thought probably Russian Caravan) then failing to use our SpaCard to access the sauna. Here’s one of their marketing shots:

Spa’d out, we contacted the insurance company – the windscreen will be replaced in the UK with only £150 excess to pay. The tiny chip above it carries an excess of £1800 and will also affect our future premiums so looks like I’ll be fixing that myself.

That all (not really) sorted, we went into town. We’d previously walked Flynn around the neighbourhood and deduced that Bella Costa Étterem és Vendégház was the only place in town that wasn’t a pizza or burger place. So, back we were. It looked dead from outside but it was far from it inside; there was a wedding going on – albeit a very somber and restrained wedding. We took a table at the other end of the room and tried to order drinks. All the staff came out to try and help but nobody spoke any English. We resisted Google Translate and did manage to order a small bottle of beer and a white wine through the medium of mime and repeating english words A BIT LOUDER. So, only the size of beer was wrong, not too bad.

Then food, the menu did have English translations but sometimes you needed to check all the languages to make sure it wasn’t a mistranslation.

Luckily that was spot on and very good it was too. Jane had something which was basically the same but with a different stuffing “…sheep’s cottage cheese, leek and smoked knuckle filling, fried in wine batter served with fresh vegetables and steak potatoes” to be exact. We swapped halves so neither of us missed out. Flynn will have a massive breakfast of leftovers tomorrow. For some reason my brain escalope came with rice and chips – but no curry sauce which, thinking about it now, would have been genius.

As I write this, the town music system has fired up and is playing a mariachi waltz. Hungary is nothing if not odd. It’s great.