Tirrilstrip12
 Days 146 & 147 Day 146 A pretty uneventful day as it turned out, so I’ll chunter on a bit about last night’s meal and our take on Hungarian cuisine. The meal turned out pretty well – vegetable soup, a rosemary chicken & potato main and a bit of an iffy chocolate swiss rolly affair. And the wine was good. The main down side was that they were showing the Olympics in the restaurant – and what was on? Yup – water polo. Anyway, that aside, from what we’ve seen, the Hungarian cuisine is not the most interesting or refined (although who are we to demand “refined”?) – they’re big on soups, which is fine by me, but if you want any other starter, you’ll be struggling. It seems proper goulash is actually a soup too (and very nice). Grilled meats seems to be the mainstay of main courses, and they don’t really seem to bother much with puds at all – other than pancakes. Enough of the culinary talk, we set off this morning and had a nice drive up into the Bukk hills through miles of beech woods. Got to the campsite at Hollosteto okay – bit of a run down place, but in a nice spot surrounded by woods. Had a really nice walk this afternoon – and the waymarking was pretty good. No TV reception here, so didn’t have the opportunity to catch up on how Hungary were doing in the water polo. Will head on to Slovakia tomorrow and see what that brings. Day 147 Now if we’d been in Blighty, it wouldn’t have been a problem. We’d have been prepared – expectant even. As it was, we’d set out for a walk around the extensive grounds of a ‘chateau’ in the village of Betlia in Slovakia in our (now) usual fashion of shorts/T shirts/sandals, having paid our 5 Euros parking fee in the village (it’s been a long while since we’ve had to pay parking fees, other than in city centres – and even there it has been negligible of late). Sorry – I digress – so we were off walking in the grounds of the chateau, at the recommendation of our birding book. Bins at the ready, we excitedly headed away from the crowds (yes – there were actually a few people here). Our book had promised us 6 types of woodpecker, crested tits and black redstarts. So while Tirril ran amok amongst the trees, we busied ourselves scanning the greenery for our ornothological (?) prey. And what did we see? A coal tit. Again. Oh, and a few great tits. Wow. And what didn’t we see? Apart from the woodpeckers etc? It was the black clouds that had been amassing in that typical English summer sort-of-a-way that you'll know all too well. And then of course, it rained. And not with a dainty English drizzle, but in a torrential Slavik downpouring. We got soaked. At least we were able to change into dry clothes when we got back to the van. But it tipped down for the rest of the afternoon and evening. Fortunately we found a campsite at Krasnohorske not too far away that had a hardstanding we could park on – most of the sites in eastern Europe seem to be grassy – which is nice when it’s dry, but the van is so poor on wet grass that it is a bit of an issue for us. No wi-fi here – first time we’ve been at a site with no wi-fi in eastern Europe. Still – we had good TV reception so were able to watch the Olympics – and as we’re no longer in Hungary – there was no water polo! Or synchronised swimming. In fact, I guess because Slovakia are not too strong an olympic nation, they seem to show the good bits of sport, irrespective of which nations are competing so we got a good range to watch.
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Diary Photos
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Closed castle, Krasnohorske |
 Bukk hills |
 Lunchtime walk |
 Sit! |
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