Hungary 🇭🇺 and the Iron curtain

Next we needed to get supplies and as luck would have it we found a Lidl. This is when we found yet another compelling reason to fall in love with Slovenia. For one thing it was the first time in I don’t know how long that we found the sorts of food we are familiar with as simple English folk. And the icing on the cake, it was much cheaper than we’d seen lately. Spain was good value, but had a strange selection of food we often didn’t have a clue what to do with. We’d joked about how inconsiderately foreign it all was 😂 This on the other hand is proper homely.
Pleased with our haul of familiar nosh we continued towards Hungary 🇭🇺 (safe in the knowledge we wouldn’t be going hungry now 🤭)
Crossing the border was a radical shift in our reality, within minutes Ivy’s suspension was being put to the test on the worst roads we’d encountered since leaving the UK. Housing was much more basic too, less maintained and altogether grimier. Litter was present in quantities we hadn’t seen since Kent, possibly even worse. Our first impressions were not favourable but we thought things would likely improve. However after a couple of hours little improvement was seen. The pothole strewn roads did cut through vast areas of forest but even they somehow lacked the prettiness of the forests we’ve become accustomed to. Now I don’t know if we just happened to be travelling through a particularly deprived area of Hungary but our initial idea of spending a few days exploring was swiftly replaced by a desire to get the hell out of there. This meant adding at least another couple of hours to our drive today as we headed northward to the relative sanctuary of Austria once more.
Right on the border into Austria and still in Hungary we came upon a park up for a memorial garden dedicated to preserving the history of the Iron Curtain that once separated the two countries. Here’s where we decided to stay for the night. We left Ivy with our bums numbed from being chair bound for hours and went to explore the park. For Darren (and for me to a lesser extent) the subject of the memorial park was particularly interesting, as it detailed the events that led to the creation and ultimately the dismantling of the Berlin Wall and the Iron Curtain as a whole in 1989. Darren had lots to say as he was actually there in Berlin on the night that the Soviet Union fell apart. Yet another of his favourite “during the war” stories 😂. That night he’d been right there, taking his turn at bashing the wall down with a sledgehammer within just 50ft of the Brandenburg Gate. On one of the most significant events of the twentieth century he’d been a part of history...so I suppose I can forgive him for going on (and on) (and on) about it 😜. We have some of the wall he’d demolished at home. In the following days he was able to cross into East Berlin which he describes as like going back in time to the Second World War. The scars of bullets still visible on many of the oldest buildings that had survived the bombings.
Anyway we explored the entire park and read EVERY single word before I was finally able to retreat back to the peace and quiet of Ivy and settle down to sleep after what had been a very (very) long day.Read more