A Brief Pause
Daily Blog #1 — Reporting from Budapest
94 days on the road and I’ve only posted 7 times.
Clearly, I’ve been having problems completing the cycle of write/edit/publish so I’m going to try an experiment: write everyday for a week. No hemming and hawing. Just get it out there.
We’re in Budapest and we’re loving the city, despite the heat and 10 flights of stairs to our apartment. It’s not that we don’t appreciate leg day, but it makes going outside a commitment — if you forget something, you had better really need it.
The past weekend was a whirl of two key activities:
- Planning the rest of our adventure through the Balkans and down to Vietnam and Cambodia before heading home
- Joining in the festivities for Hungary’s State Foundation Day which were delicious, fun, and very much akin to our own July 4th
Since I haven’t finished editing any of the photos for the latter, I guess today’s topic will be the former.
How Are We Doing?
I’ve been getting this in a couple emails so I guess we’ve dropped off the map just enough for some folks to get concerned. We like hearing we’re missed so, if you’ve written, you are a special person to me right now.
We’ve fallen into a good rhythm on the road. Each morning, after a caffeine infused breakfast and brief discussion of our daily plans, we separate to work on creative pursuits. Following lunch, we explore something in our chosen city of the week and enjoy a long walk around in the cooler hours of the day before retiring home to read, process photos, and sleep. It’s a meditative life. We frequently see groups of young people carousing from bar to bar, drunk on life and spirits, but I must admit, I have no desire to join them. It’s not just that I’ve been there, done that (and yes, I have the t-shirt); it’s just not what we’re here for.
If you’re wondering why there hasn’t been a Musing post on the Baltics from Ian, it’s because he’s in the midst of producing a short story; the first he’s going to attempt to submit for proper publication. He can get quite obsessive and this story has him jotting notes in cafes, probing me for thoughts on arcs, and even robbing him of his precious sleep from time to time.
I’m proud of him and it doesn’t bother me as I’ve been committed to leaning into the feeling of restlessness and boredom. Several friends laughed at the concept of me allowing myself to get bored before we left and I’ll admit my competitive nature rankled at their teasing.
I can relax! You don’t know me!
I hate being proven wrong so the past month has been my own obsessive effort to rip out by the roots my compulsion to be productive. Although, to no one’s surprise, that has become it’s own kind of productivity:
- I’ve finished nine books
- Kon Mari’ed my internet bookmarks
- Developed a photography creative workflow I actually enjoy
- Reduced my consumption of social media
- Am doing yoga and meditating most mornings
Yeah, maybe one of those isn’t actually a useful pursuit, I don’t know what your version of relaxing is so I’m calling it a win. So there.
Where Are You Going Next?
When we created our original itinerary, we deliberately left this portion of the trip hazy. We didn’t know what shape we’d be in emotionally or physically and while we were fairly confident our wallet wouldn’t be in extreme distress, we didn’t want to rule out the possibility that this trip would end in early September. We could live with a four month trip. There would be no shame in coming home early. The trip wasn’t about distance or check boxes— it was our way of resetting our lives. Call it privilege, luck, or a waste, but we were making this our own journey together.
Over various gravy-drenched meals in Slovakia and Poland in July, we decided that no, the trip wasn’t going to be over. However, with our 90-day Schengen-zone visa ending in September, we had to decide between going deeper into Eastern Europe and Turkey or finding a plane to somewhere new.
We chose plane and played flight roulette with my father-in-law in Estonia the last week of July trying to find the cheapest way from the Mediterranean to SE Asia. We ended up with one-way tickets from Athens to Vietnam in September with no remote idea of what we would do down there.
Click. Bought. That’s next month’s problem.
We had only booked lodging and transit up to Budapest at this point so before we could get into what excitement lay in Vietnam, we had to figure out how we’d get from Budapest to Athens over three weeks.
If you haven’t tried it, navigating around the Balkans can be a challenge in logistical planning, especially if you’re used to well established train routes. There are buses, trains, ferries, planes, and taxis all connecting through various towns and cities with scant information on how reliable each of these might be. (Well, except for the planes. Huge aluminum tubes of jet fuel tend to be pretty regulated as it turns out.)
We settled on hopping a train from Hungary to Croatia which will hit the pause button on our Schengen Zone clock at 81 days. After some scuba diving for me and some beach time for Ian, we settled on leaving Croatia by bus to enjoy a couple nights in Mostar, followed by a train to Sarajevo, a bus to Belgrade, and then an early morning flight to Athens. After a week of crawling over every Greek ruin we can get our hands on, we wave goodbye to Europe on Sept 22nd with exactly three days to spare on our Schengen Zone tourist visa. Although we’ve heard reports of people overstaying their visas, the concept of thousand dollar fines and being banned from any European adventures for the next 5 years didn’t exactly appeal, hence our strange hop-skip across Bosnia & Herzegovina and Serbia.
This weekend was spent finalizing it all and securing lodging for our trek before turning to the big question: what are we going to do in Vietnam and when are we going home?
Well, truth is, we don’t know quite yet but, given it’s still a month out, I’m sure we’ll figure it out somewhere between sunning in Hvar and sipping wine in a floating bar in Belgrade. After 94 days on the road, I think my future self can handle it.
Follow us on Instagram for more travel updates. Ian will return soon with more #iantrollseurope statue photos as soon as he’s finished wrestling his story to the publisher.
