In which Sid and Doris find the button museum and sleep in a folk museum.
The first day south of Budapest certainly adds to the epic-ness of the journey. Getting out of the city gives us the opportunity to see the back lanes where people throw their rubbish. We covered about 100 kilometres but are tired from the varied surfaces and the 30+ degree heat.
We have had cobbles, rubble, dirt tracks, quiet roads, busy roads and to top it off ‘the grassy path along the top of the dyke’. In case you are thinking of making this journey know that the path is instead of Route 51 which has been resurfaced and hole-filled 51 times by people with neither the skills, budget nor inclination to do a decent job.
The day is made epic for reasons beyond the boredom of just making progress by two or three things. In Rackeve we had lunch at Sylvia Llewellyn’s Button Museum. Speaking English, having cheese sandwiches and marmalade were all great. And then we had a personal tour of the button collection from early bone through 19th and 20th century iterations of plastic – and these from Hungary and beyond. Her book on Old Buttons is a certain #virtualsouvenir.
The second epic item is Rackeve Serbian Greek Orthodox Church (with blue tower as seen in Pressburg/Bratislava). The interior is completely painted and (we need to check) some of it looked very Hieronymus Bosch. Mostly the painter was Todor Gruntovich (yes, Miftah Bat, really).
Miftah Bat also thought that the devils were doing some very funny things with people’s bottoms.
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And this painting of Jesus’ baptism is just casually lovely, tucked away in a small corner of a small church in a small village somewhere in the middle of a large collection of countries.
The final epic is ‘the grassy path on top of the dyke’. As we bash our way through the knee high grass we recall having rejected vaccination against tick-bourne encephalitis on the basis that we were on a road trip and if we were cycling through tall grass then something had gone vairy wrong. No comments, please.
Lightly epic is the place where we have a zimmer tonight just around the corner from the castle. Damn, cycling up at the end of the day.
The rooming place is more traditional than you could possibly want: the Hungarian for gemutlicheit with the bathrooms down the hall, cats weaning kittens and a sausage dog roaming the yard. Oh, and they breed mosquitos in stale water features. We are pretty sure there is no breakfast so are now plotting how to fuel for the next exciting instalment when we may find a paprika museum.