Saturday, July 11, 2009

Glitch in Budapest

I visited the Mountain Equipment Coop with a friend this afternoon and, and while she was looking for some water shoes (for kayaking), I received a call from Nick. That seemed a little weird, because his name came up and that meant that he was roaming in Europe ... GAK.

Anyway ... MEC is a little noisy, but he opened with "we have a problem", which most certainly got my attention instantly :-)

The bottom line is that one of their bags went missing, and in it was Georgie's passport and Nick's Eurorail pass. They will be very busy over the next two days in order to get those replaced in time to leave for Vienna on Tuesday.

An update on their train ride ... they got on board, expecting to have a sleeper car, and they got booted down to cattle class almost immediately. 15 hours with no recline ... so they took off to another car and found a room with 6 seats in it that they could lie on for the whole trip. The only real glitch was the Hungarian tramp (Nick's word) that kept coming in half cut ... and being awoken at 8 sentry points along the way.

Turns out the route they took went through Slovenia as expected, but then turned south through Croatia instead of straight east through Austria as expected. The guards never spoke English, but as soon as they saw the Canadian flag they went away. Now that's cool :-)

They have just had their food budget slashed for the next couple of months since Nick must buy a new Eurorail for a grand and Georgie must spend a few hundred bucks on her passport.

Shit happens I suppose ...

Oh yeah ... while I was getting the whole scoop from Nick, she found some water shoes ... exactly the ones I chose (but which I could not convey while talking to Nick), although for a rather different reason. She likes how they keep rocks out and I just think they look really cute. :-)

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