Start of stage 2: From Pécs to Udvar

In the shade of a few large lime trees a blue-green Dutch caravan, without a car, is parked at a simple parking lot. There is a playground with sturdy wooden climbing frames, swings and slides. The place is surrounded with walled houses, behind which there are fields filled with summery crops. Birds are singing, crickets are chirping. The sun shines brightly, the air is warm and heavy.

The town of Udvar consists of a single, long street with only a few houses, a church, a community center and a gas station with a small convenience store. Sounds like a stereotypical small French countryside village, yet we are only two hundred meters from the Hungarian-Croatian border, the outer border of the European Union. A tall watchtower, a true border station with both a Hungarian and a Croatian side and a kilometer-long line of trucks are grim reminders of a not so distant European past. The time before the Schengen-Treaty.

Jan Kennis, the Dutch Cultural Embassy Representative in Hungary took us here yesterday. Before we left, several hundreds of school children, their teachers, a few reporters and Ágnes Simon, a Pécs 2010 Official, waved us goodbye from the Flying Grass Carpet (the travelling city park) in Pécs. On our way towards Croatia I enjoyed the Hungarian countryside. Large corn and wheat fields, farms, abandoned service stations and many crucifixes along the road side, just as we know them in Limburg in the Netherlands. A beautiful holiday destination indeed. After the ride we canned Jan’s aspiration to restore the old water mill in a historic Hungarian village before 2016.

Our spot at Udvar Town Square

Cooking on the caravan stove and eating under a clear starry sky. It gives the start of the second stage of the Caravan Hitchhiking Project a holiday-like atmosphere. But we have work to do. Today we have to cross a border, out of the European Union, into the Balkans. Not sure how we will get the caravan across the border yet. Perhaps we will have to push it over!