Where's Noah's ark when you need it?

Here we are in Timisoara, Romania with 2 more countries down and 12 more to go! My knees are counting them down.

So Steve left off the last post when we were in beautiful Hungary. We stayed in an intentional community called Gyürüfü Ecovillage. It is a pretty neat space. There are 25 residents living there and each family has their own hectare of land. Our host Imre had an incredible house made the traditional Hungarian style, using mud brick and straw to build the walls. Most of the homes are built like this here. Super insulated to hold the heat and it is naturally very cool in the summer. Now that Hungary has joined the European Union Imre said it will be illegal to build homes this way under E.U. law. Ridiculous eh. Good old conventional style homes with poor to terrible insulating qualities that are continually reliable on non-renewable inputs of energy! "That's the kind of house I want daddy." Good planning. Anyways, the roof on his home was of particular interest to me, because it is a reed roof that is made by harvesting local reeds from a nearby marsh. It too is a good insulator and is completely renewable. The only challenge is finding the locals who still have the knowledge to build the roofs like this as it is in jeopardy of disappearing. “Daddy how come nobody can build reed roofs anymore.? Well you see son, it isn’t good for the economy to use local regenerative reeds. You need to use black shingles that get really, really hot in the summer and have to be replaced in twenty years and are made from all kinds of chemicals and petroleum so people sweat and want to buy air conditioners.” Sorry. I have to stop doing that. So anyways, the village is also home to many sheep and cows that are used for making cheese and providing milk for the residents. Really good cheese too! The milkman would come by every morning with fresh milk. Remarkable community. Thanks Imre!

From Gyürüfü we pushed the old pedals towards Serbia. True to form, we got rained on heavily the day that we left. And I mean heavy. Noah himself would have been proud of this torrential downpour. I embraced our 4 days of rain content with the knowledge that it would end soon enough. Steve, understandably, didn't share my enthusiasm for embracing for the crummy weather. We were forced to resort to hotel accommodations in Mohacs on the banks of the Danube. The next morning it was raining even harder. We rode into a little border town and stopped at a super smoky pub to have a couple of cappuccino’s to bring our core temperature up. While I was sitting there I here," Hey you want a beer or what?” Then a woman walks by with a Canada sweater on. Very random. You never know where you’ll bump into a Canadian in the randomness that is life. They invited us for bean soup but we had to push on to Serbia.