Rosie and The Operator are travelling around Slovakia, Romania and the ‘in between on the road’ super sized cities of Budapest and Vienna for the next 24 Days on a self driving road trip.
Spis Castle in the Beautiful Slovakian Countryside
Brasov Romania
Schonbrunn Palace Vienna Austria
Fishermans Bastion Budapest Hungary
It will be our first time visiting any of these destinations and we cant wait to hit the ground and start exploring! First, we have to get to our starting point in Budapest. Rosie is in Malaga, Spain and The Operator is in New Zealand.
In the past, coming from different destinations and meeting up in a foreign country has been trying, and, often not gone to plan. Today, this connection was no exception!
Slovakian Flag
Romanian Flag
Rosie was nervous about her 1.5 hour transit in Madrid on the way to Budapest. You are reading this, nodding your head and thinking, plenty of time! Well, Rosie is a ditherer, a worrier and has absolutely no sense of direction. To be honest The Operator normally cuts the track and Rosie follows obliviously along, especially in an airport.
With previous memories of being lost in Istanbul Airport, missed flights and all of the disaster that followed a prior solo connection Rosie’s focus is like a lazer beam when she exits her flight in Madrid. To the next gate!
A board showing international connections is right in front of Rosie as she exits, stroke of luck! There is her next flight number to Budapest and the gate it is leaving from. Excellent. Now to find the gate. Instead of blindly forging forward, Rosie stops, looks around, breathes deeply and frowns…serious?! Her next boarding gate is right next door to the one she has just just entered. Literally 10 steps away. Awesome. Relief washes over Rosie, thank goodness, that was easy. Behold, two gates down, is that a wine bar Rosie spies? Time for a vino and a check in with The Operator who should be in transit in Dubai right now.
What! Rosie cannot believe it! The Operator has missed his flights and is stuck on his boat off the coast in Taranaki. He is still in New Zealand and has not even started his journey yet! The weather is bad, and it looks like he may not even make his re scheduled flight out of Auckland tonight either. Noooooo, The Operator was supposed to get to Budapest three hours before Rosie did…now he is over 24 hours behind!
It was The Operators lucky day, a window of weather cleared. The Operator was lifted off his boat and just caught the last flight from New Plymouth to Auckland by the skin of his teeth. He then even had a couple of minutes to slug a glass of champagne in the Emirates lounge before collapsing in his seat buckled in for his 18 hour flight to Dubai. He put his noise cancelling headphones on and slept all the way.
Rosie landed in Budapest in the rain on her own with no one to greet her coming out of arrivals as planned. Jumping in a taxi driven by a lad in a suit barely old enough to shave or surely legally drive and who spoke no English, Rosie was whisked through Budapest to her apartment a couple of streets back from the Danube River. An apartment locked and barricaded like nothing Rosie had ever experienced and a bunch of keys so big and heavy, there was no way they would fit in your pocket.
A security pin pad outside let you into the grim, blocky, ex communist era building, ‘please make sure no one follows you inside’. A key card was needed to activate the lift to take you to your floor. The large globes of security cameras were everywhere. My apartment as did everyone’s on the dim floor had large heavy iron jail bars across the apartment door that you opened with a key. Then another key opened the apartment door…no hold on, that wasn’t the apartment door, it was a door into another small corridor, creepily dimmer, darker and grimmer than the main one, with two doors at the end. My reflection gleamed in the dark camera globe attached to the ceiling as I used another key to unlock the apartment door. Rosie wasn’t sure if she felt safe or….trapped. Please do not let a fire break out she prayed, Rosie will not be able to master the bunch of keys quick enough.
The only thing making Rosie smile at the moment was the sign in the lobby for the recycling bins asking us to ‘flutter’ our plastic waste.
The shine of a new city was dulled. Today in Budapest, without The Operator, Rosie didn’t have the heart to strike out on her own and explore this beautiful city. Rosie will wait to do this together when we return a little later on down the line. In the mean time Rosie will go out for dinner and recheck her plans…oh, no…Rosie forgot to take her umbrella and its still raining, she turns around to re enter the building to fetch it…thinks better of unlocking all those doors and forges on.
So where are we going! It’s a busy, self-driving schedule covering a lot of ground.
Check out our 24 Day Itinerary Eastern European Roadtrip.
Arrive Budapest – I Night – three hour drive to
Kosice – Slovakia – 2 nights – drive 1.5 hour drive to
Bardejov – Slovakia – 1 Night – drive 1.5 hours to
Levoca – Slovakia – 1 night – drive 4.5 hours to
Vienna – Capitol City of Austria – 3 nights – drive 1 hour to
Bratislava – Capitol City of Slovakia – 2 nights – drive 2 hours to
Budapest – Capitol City of Hungary – 2 nights – return the rental car and fly to
Bucharest – Capitol City of Romania – 2 nights – then collect a rental car and drive 8 hours to
Sibiu – Romania – via the Transfagarason Highway – 3 nights – drive 2 hours to
Brasov – Romania – 2 nights – drive 1.5 hours to
Sighisoara – Romania – 4 nights – we were supposed to drive 6 hours up the country to visit Suceava, but decided to cancel this leg and stay on in Sighisoara. It is such a beautiful place and we needed a little time to pause and catch our breath. Leaving town it was a 4 hour drive to
Bucharest – Romania – 1 night – returned rental car. Rosie and The Operator then both flew home to New Zealand the next day.
Yay, our holiday can begin! Rosie is reunited with The Operator at Budapest airport the next day. The Operator was ‘fresh’ off a direct 30 hour flight from Taranaki in New Zealand. He was determined to collect the rental car, and move on today, on the day it was ordered, as per the holiday schedule but with no refreshing overnight break for him as planned.
The Operator arrived! Straight into carrying all the bags.
The Operator was adamant he was able to drive the three hours to our next destination.
The Operator reassured Rosie he was fine, had slept well on the plane and was raring to go.
The Operator promised Rosie that if he was tired, he would pull over and they would stay somewhere en route for the night.
The Operator negotiates leaving Budapest, a city of 1.7 million people weaving through the multiple traffic lanes like a pro. Not long afterward we hit the countryside and it is plain sailing.
The Operator cheerfully drove through non stop, he said he was fine every time Rosie asked.
We checked into our first destination right on schedule as per the holiday plan! It is only now, when Rosie is publishing this, a year later that The Operator admits to Rosie that he would never do that again after a long haul flight. The Operator confessed it was like he was driving after drinking a whole bottle of tequila! What the hell!
First port of call for The (tuckered out) Operator after the super long, direct journey from New Zealand to Kosice in Slovakia was a nice cold beer and a wee meat snack of beef tongue and horseradish with a beautiful marinated hemelin cheese…then bed!
Tomorrow let Rosie and The Operator show you around the beautiful Slovakian City of Kosice. Are we finally visiting a destination ‘off the beaten track’? There was hardly anyone around when we went exploring in the morning… then, in the afternoon we were mobbed by colourful, chanting, taunting armies! Check it out, in tomorrows post.
