Day 24 In Esztergom In Search of Museums

In which Sid and Doris fail to find a really Bonkers museum but take the opportunity to reflect on other museums they have seen so far.

The Portobello Hotel has great indoor spaces and terraces so we have decided that a day’s Planning is in order.  Before leaving we planned the first three weeks in some detail, but now we wanted to check that we can really see a feasible route to Istanbul.  Increasingly the length of each day is going to be controlled by the availability of towns with accommodation – hence the increasing frequency of camping-cyclists we are meeting on the route.  Our compromise is that we’d rather modify the route to find accommodation rather than dragging along a full set of camping kit… time to make sure that theory really works.

Three hours later we have a more-or-less convincing route which looks like we can get there in another 22 days including rest days and a bit of contingency.  Time to leave the e-routing devices behind and hit the town in search of a museum.

Sid and Doris have a very definite view on museums.  There is little point on an Epic Journey trying to see world-spanning collections of art or artefacts.  They will all blur into one, and once you are in the museum you forget which town/country you are in.  However, it’s really important that you do stop and look at things, as otherwise you could get obsessed with Making Progress and forget to actually interact with the countryside.  We owe it to our audience – no! we owe it to ourselves! – to get the flavour of the countryside we are pedalling through.

But what we do like is a small and focused museum.  This started with some good friends of ours, Simon Nash and Rachael Atkinson, together known as The Specs for reasons I now forget.  They have since happily gone their separate ways, but together the four of us had a great time one year exploring the Buckie Drifter museum.  Please do go there if you are ever in Buckie (north Scotland), it featured some printed-material stuffed herrings which still live on in my memory.  But also when they lived near Chester, there was a local “Salt Museum” which we failed to go to over several years.  So now when we see a sign to something like a “Salt Museum” we know that we have to go there.

Which meant that two days ago in Gyor, when we saw a signpost to a “‘Tiled Stove Museum”, 5 mins walk, we simply had to go there.  Mysteriously, even though Sid looked it up on his phone and saw that it was due to have closed half an hour previously, we still decided we needed to walk there.  So that is the sort of people your correspondents are, they will walk to a knowingly-closed and highly-pointless micro-museum.

And to our delight it was actually open.

PS Here is today’s mystery Old Crock.  And behind him a camper van ha ha.