(Daniel) Somehow last night, we missed the train line running 20 feet from where we were sleeping in the roof tent. Another strange thing to mention, is that all of us are experiencing nightmares when we sleep, perhaps it’s something to do with all this cheese that Rowan keeps buying! After discussing last nights spooky episodes we got up and hooked up the trailer before stopping at Tesco and heading back out of Slovakia, into Hungary.
The roads which we experienced coming into Hungary were amazing, so straight and flat, you could see for miles, and there was no one else on them, literally, you could drive for twenty minutes and not see a single vehicle! Given this opportunity, I let Gabby have a go at driving, so she took us almost all the way form the border to Budapest.
As we drove into Budapest , on the Pest side, (Buda and Pest are two separate cities divided by the river Danube.) We spotted a sign for camping, and followed until we drove across to Buda and a beautiful campsite in the forest on a hill leading out of the city. Once we had agreed a price with the owner, we set about opening the trailer tent for the first time since our departure. This went nice and smoothly, and I started to change the brake pads on the Wolf, a task which we decided was necessary before entering Romania and tackling the poor roads ahead. My work was cut short however when I realised that instead of having 3 sets of front pads and 3 sets of rear pads, I in fact had 6 sets of front pads! I put the wheel back on the Wolf and telephoned the local Land Rover dealer. They explained that the service department was closed until Monday, so we decided to stay on until then, and go and see them first thing after the weekend.
After a quick lunch of Tomato soup with lentils, Gabby Rowan and I took the Wolf down to the city and drove to the huge Market hall in Pest, however it was closed by the time we got there, so instead we took a quick tour before parking up in Buda outside the labyrinth entrance to the Castle on the hill overlooking the Danube. We took a walk around the area, and stopped to admire the view of Pest from the heights of Buda. After this we walked back to the car and went looking for a place to eat dinner. However it was harder than we thought to find a good place and we ended up driving back up to the castle and wandering around starving before eventually asking a local who recommended a restaurant called Oscars at the bottom of the hill. Rowan joked that it was probably a steak house, and I suppose that this made it easier to take when it turned out that it actually was a steak house! We ate a huge meal each in there, I had Carpaccio of salmon, followed by a huge piece of veal with a mushroom sauce, washed down with some unicum, a local spirit infused with herbs similar to Fernet.
When we returned to the campsite we were all so tired that we went straight to bed, I stayed up in bed watching a movie on the laptop before dozing off and having a wonderful nights sleep, interrupted only by the occasional stray dog howling.
Distance driven 289km
Meals Eaten Cheese Tomato Sandwich, Tomato & Lentil soup, Carpaccio of Salmon with toast, Veal with Mushroom sauce.