48 Hours

The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men
Gang aft agley
Robert Burns, To a Mouse

If you recall from last year, we have a break of six days for Easter. When one of the boys first mentioned the idea of going to Romania, my response was apathy. I’d never really been interested in Romania, aside from as what I considered something of a linguistic oddity, as an eastern European nation whose language is based not on a Slavic root but on Latin. But when he directed us to websites with information on Maramureş, the region he wanted to visit, I began to get interested. Before very long I’d decided to go, because I knew that in the future, my chances to visit Romania would be few, and really, why not go?

The boy did all the work planning this trip. He found bus and train times, booked our accommodation, and reserved a rental car, all the while providing us (the other boy and me) with updates on his progress. The plan was to travel to Cluj-Napoca, Romania, via Budapest, leaving on Thursday afternoon and arriving Friday morning; pick up the rental car and drive north to Maramureş; see the sights, including wooden churches, a peculiar and colorful cemetery, and well-preserved village life; enjoy a typical Romanian Easter celebration; and return the rental car and head home, arriving in Tisovec Monday afternoon.

This does not appear overly complicated until you realize that each clause in the previous sentence has a number of subpoints. For instance, traveling to Cluj really had six parts, which you’ll read about in detail later. While hardly ideal, this is just the way you must travel if you want to go anywhere substantially distant from Tisovec, and we all know this. And we completed all of these first subtasks without difficulty, even though we did have to go through Budapest, which is the boy’s least favorite place in Europe (and maybe the world).

When we arrived in Cluj, we walked from the bus station to the city center, and from there got a taxi to the rental car place. Which turned out to be a single modular building, surrounded by a fence, off a dirt road. There we were given an Opel Astra that looked a little worse for wear--there was a crack in the windshield, for one, and it just wasn’t in the overall condition you’d expect to find at a major rental company. There turned out to be a problem with the gearshift, and when we noticed smoke coming from under the hood, we returned to the lot. The owner then accused our five minutes’ driving of ruining the car, and refused to rent us a different car. We walked a few kilometers back to the city center, where we ate lunch and discussed our options. The rest of the original plan was largely contingent on having a car, since Maramureş is a bit off the beaten path, and we wouldn’t have been able to get around the area without one. Since it was Good Friday, we didn’t have much hope of being able to locate another rental company with available cars. In the end we decided to scrap the trip and go with Plan F*.

We then walked to the train station to see how we could get home. We found a train to Budapest, then got one of the girls back home to look online and find us a route from there back to T-town. This route would take us about twelve hours and would require several train changes. It hardly seemed possible for a journey of so little distance to last so long; but it seemed preferable, to me at least, to start moving in the right direction, even if it took all night.

We got home a bit after noon on Saturday just two days after we’d left. Objectively, the trip was a failure, and the boy was pretty upset about his plans coming to naught, and obviously for that I felt bad. But somewhere along the line, when we’d been traveling for quite a few hours, the situation crossed from “Wretched” to “Ridiculous,” and I enjoyed it in a way. Of course, I wouldn’t do it again next weekend, but I’ve come to believe that it was the most epic 48-hour adventure of my life. I will treasure the memory of the three of us sprawled across seats on the train back to Hungary, none of us wearing our shoes, thereby proving that we could not possibly have been smugglers.

Here is the whole of our trip. 1 through 6 were in the original plan; 7 is where the new plan kicked in. The times are what the schedules said they should have been, not our actual arrival times, although they were all pretty close.

1. Bus from Tisovec to Brezno (Thursday, 12:30-13:23)
2. Bus from Brezno to Banská Bystrica (13:34-14:15)
3. Bus from Bystrica to Štúrovo (14:40-18:00)
4. Train from Štúrovo to Budapest-Nyugati Station (18:43-19:54 )
5. Layover in Budapest (19:54-23:00), including taking the metro from Nyugati to Nepliget bus station and getting dinner
6. Overnight coach from Budapest to Cluj-Napoca (Thursday, 23:00-Friday, 7:45 (including going forward one time zone))
6a. Passport check at the border (Friday, 3:33-4:03). Although both Romania and Hungary are in the EU, Romania is a non-Schengen area country, which means it has border restrictions that other countries don’t have. Under normal circumstances, for example, there are no border checks between Slovakia and Austria or Hungary or the Czech Republic or Poland.
7. Taking care of business in Cluj (7:45-15:12)
8. Train from Cluj to Budapest-Keleti (15:12-21:00 (including going back one time zone))
8a. Two passport checks
9. Layover in Budapest (21:00-23:48), where I got a milkshake from McDonalds, so the trip was by no means a waste
10. Train from Budapest to Hatvan (Friday, 23:48-Saturday, 1:02)
11. Layover in Hatvan (1:02-4:10)
12. Train from Hatvan to Somoskoujfalo (4:10-5:49)
13. Train from Somoskoujfalo to Fiľakovo, Slovakia (6:20-6:38)
14. Layover in Fiľakovo (6:38-8:22)
15. Train from Fiľakovo to Rimavská Sobota (8:22-9:21)
16. Layover in Rimba Somba (9:21-11:14)
17. Train from Rimba Somba to Tisovec (11:14-12:05)


*“Screw it”…but with alliteration.