Budapest to Baia Mare

Greetings from Baia Mare, Romania. (Get out your atlas). We overslept and ended up dashing out of Budapest - with no wrong turns this time. We did have to go back to the Exchange to get more Forints to get the car out of hock. The parking was about double what the hotel told us. Don't ask.

We spent about half the day on the main highways, but then had to transition to the 2-lane roads in the Hungarian countryside. We passed through a succession of small towns. Kind of like driving Rt 1 through Maine - or California. Speed up to 100 kph between towns, and slow down to 60 kph in town. Zipping around the lorries. eek.

I would love to show pictures of the charming Hungarian towns/villages, but we were trying to make up for the late start and the loss of an hour traveling East. I'm hoping we can stop on the way back. Each of the houses has a fence or low brick wall and a fence. Most are made of wrought iron - and they are all different. Some have fences instead. The iris are in bloom and many of the houses had banks of variegated leaved iris. Really pretty. And we saw 3 horse-drawn carts, sheep, goats. But no cows.

When we left Budapest, we tried to set up the GPS to get us to the hotel, but apparently, the streets in Baia Mare are not in the database. So we said just get us to the city center. That was fine until we lost the signal part way across Hungary. I think the divided highway has been extended since the database was created. We managed to get to Satu Mare, but lost track of the street names. We did find signs for Baia Mare and followed them. Not the shortest route, but probably the fastest. Romanian towns look less prosperous than those in Hungary.

There was an official border crossing between Hungary and Romania. Stamped passports and everything. We saw one of the customs officials confiscate a bag of fresh fruit from one car, then procede to eat one of the pears. Perks of the job.

The countryside we traveled through is like home - corn is just coming up and the wheat is getting beaten down by all the rain. Many fields had some flooded areas.

BTW, they still pump gas for you in Hungary and Romania.

We got in at about 7:30 with the time change. We were able to contact our researcher, Dan, and invite him for dinner. We hope to spend tomorrow in the Archives, with maybe a trip to Sighet or Sapinta tomorrow. Dan has graciously given us copies of all of the records he has photographed. Some are in Hungarian, some German and some Latin. Should be fun.