By Joe mostly with input from Bobbie

We’re in the “blue” bus as we ride from Budapest to meet the ship on Belgrade (we hope). There are also two “red” buses. They’re actually all white, but that helps us divide into groups. As we leave Croatia we leave the EU, so passport control is needed both side of the border.

We were to leave the Budapest hotel at 8:30, but our buses came to the wrong hotel entrance. We learned this as we waited. And waited. The buses had to drive back down the Castle Hill and cross the Chain Bridge to reach the other hotel entrance. One of the drivers made an illegal turn and got a ticket, which took a while. So we loaded the busses and left an hour and a half late.

Vines in Europe.

Our route was not particularly scenic but we stopped for lunch at a remote village with a wooden figure outside the restaurant. The lunch was pork and chicken with potatoes and veggies but we had eaten a big breakfast so we didn’t even bother asking for something vegetarian. We ate a little salad and bread, and of course the dessert. And Bobbie had a glass of wine and I had a beer.

Next stop was a gas station: I bet you’ve never seen one of these. It had one toilet stall for each sex so there were long lines, especially for the ladies. But there was a large selection of treats in the convenience store.

We drove through Vukovic, which still bore signs of the Serbia/Croatia war but was otherwise very pretty.

A few more hours took us to the border, and after about an hour and a half of sitting — the actual passport inspection went pretty quickly — we were through the checkpoints and into Serbia, with red slate roofs covered with moss, and signs that seem to use a mixture of Cyrillic and Greek characters, with a Roman J for inclusion. Another hour to the ship, we hope, which means we’ll get there around 8 pm. By then we’ll be ready for a nice dinner!

There seem to be only about 100 people on this cruise. We thought the boat could handle several hundred, and rumor has it that a bunch of people cancelled in the last week as word got out about the low water levels in the river. Hope they weren’t the smart ones!