Plants. The vegetation is very, very slowly changing away from “UK normal”. I haven’t taken any photos of the abundantly-flowering roadside rose bushes which have been a feature of many villages from Hungary onwards, my bad, will try to do that before we cycle out of Rose Central. Also on the trees, we have been cycling past avenues of silver birches and here in Serbia we have suddenly started to find flowering linden trees in large numbers. The perfume is lovely, and with smell being one of the best memory senses I am looking forward to being reminded of this trip when I smell it in the future. I wonder why we don’t have them in the UK? I wonder if they can be grown and persuaded to flower in the UK? Memo to self: buy Linden tree, #virtualsouvenir.
Vending machines. Sorry, I forgot to write about these in the Czech republic. Soon after crossing the border we were charmed to be greeted by a pair of machines, offering a sort of “before and after” facility, with one selling condoms and the other cigarettes. We were less charmed, but kinda thankful, to find one selling bike inner tubes after a particularly rough section. We are out of vending machine land now, “in Serbia we have cafe culture”, every village has lots of little shops although the local habit of not displaying any stock in the window and keeping the front door firmly shut means that it is hard to tell when they are open – and in fact in our Serbian-illiterate world it is hard to tell whether they are shops at all.
Random roadside items. It is pleasingly Epic to see a bucket on a stick, an unexplained plane, an original fire engine, a saint in a field.
Weird people. People are sometimes very, very weird. While I was delighting in a picture of the 1950s Novi Sad cabbage market in the City Museum (I am a huge fan of old photos in museums, as you may be starting to realise), a woman stormed past with a man following along behind her. “You have a bad attitude! A very bad attitude!” she proclaimed loudly and, fortunately for us but unfortunately for him, in English. “You should go and sit in the car!” (it was 35’C outside, husbands can die in hot cars). Despite repeated requests from him, the nature of the Bad Attitude was not explained – I mean, I thought it was pretty off that he didn’t look at the cabbage market photo but then nor did she. An Epic Journey can put strain on a relationship, and in fact to prevent this we are scheduling Apart Time so that we’re not spending our entire lives less than 2m apart, but my God that was on a different scale.
Imaginary conversations. Actually, doesn’t everyone do this? Today we were cycling down a back road which mysteriously had occasional patches of decent tarmac. “Slobo?” “Yes?” “We have some budget for one hundred metres of good tarmac. Where shall we put it?” “Put some of it outside the local mayor’s house and some outside the entry to the quarry.” “But they are a long way apart.” “That is alright, the rest of the road is rubbish anyway.” (All has to be spoken in convincing Serbian accent of which I have none.)
Coming down a set of rather random steps from the road to our riverside restaurant the builders spoke again. “Gregor?” “Yes?” “How deep shall I make this step?” “How deep did you make the last one?” “Pretty deep.” “Well, less deep than that then.”
Finally, Sid was asked the other day in a hotel by someone interested in our Epic Journey “How do you manage leg fatigue?” ?? Like, is it different from head fatigue or back fatigue or arm fatigue? Seriously, we are starting to see our bodies changing. The wear and tear on the hands and wrists is more than we’d expected, to the extent that sometimes our grips are worryingly weak (splosh sorry that was my beer over the computer keyboard). Our backs are stronger, our knees feel endangered but our leg muscles are getting stronger which sort of compensates. And we are definitely getting thinner despite our very best efforts with ice cream and, separately, with beer. We think we are losing weight but maybe it is turning up as extra muscle somewhere. Days off are important and we need to carry on planning them in.
Perhaps she was well aware husbands can die in hot cars?