Budapest

An excerpt from my journal: We're going through these mountainous regions, now. The train keeps on floating by these walls of rock. Here and there you'll see one or two houses settled into a tiny natural valley. We saw some mountains covered with snow in the distance when we were at the edge of Italy. I think we were headed towards those mountains. The colors outside are beautiful. Dark reds, some yellows - it's late fall. A lot of the leaves are gone. It feels like we're going through towns from "Heidi On the Mountain." We've been following a river for a ways and there have been streams of tiny waterfalls coming down from the top of the mountains. This riverbank is covered with litter, like it had flooded recently and this was all the rubble left. The atmosphere kind of reminds me of Vermont or Michigan - logging states. You see smoke coming out of chimney tops.

This was all written right before Herman Cater joined our car. He's from Slovenia and he spoke English, so we got to hear a lot of first-hand stories. It had recently flooded and was only now going down. He told us about his country - people are very proud of their country. It's like a little spot of paradise because you can involve yourself in so many outdoor activities. He does paragliding and takes pictures and teaches shiat-su. He has a wife and two (grown and almost-grown) kids. He was really cool. We exchanged email addresses and he gave us this picture.