Day 5 – Rimini – Balatonfolvar

Finally, the real adventure started! We had a tuff day ahead of us: over 800 hundred km and (initially) 4 countries separating us from our destination, Balatonfoldvar. But before that, I had quite a tuff night out myself, so we only hit the road after 12.

The first part of our journey went by as smoothly as possible: nice inner close to the coast road between Rimini and Venice, not a lot of traffic (rather surprising, considering that would be the “ferragosto” night) and the Deuch keeping an extraordinary performance. We therefore made it till Trieste with only two stops: one to put gas and another one to rush out of the car and put the top back on as it started raining cats and dogs!

We made our first long pit stop at the last gas station before the Slovenian border. This way, while the Deuch had his more then deserved rest, I could delight myself with the only “gas station food” I’m actually looking forward to: “uno panino Icarus”: bread, smoked ham, Philadelphia cream cheese and ruccola. Nhamy, nhamy, nhamy!!! Soon, the Icarus, the coke and the “café fredo” were over and together with them, so were our quiet and relaxed mood. With the border just some kms away, it was time to contemplate the huge mess the Deuch’s interior had become over the past days and find my passport. It shouldn’t be that hard: it was on the pocket of my shorts, which would themselves be on my cloth bag. Easy if not for a little detail I only then, some 300 km’s away from Rimini, noticed: I had left the bag at the hostel… Major, major “Ups”!

Two possibilities: Mohamed would make a u turn and pick up the mountain, or the mountain would have to move its ass back to Mohamed, wherever he would be. As unlike Mohamed, the mountain wasn’t travelling on a tight budget and with many, many spots yet to be explored, not much of a choice. I called up Julien, who was still in Rimini and asked him to take the bag with him back home (Paris), later send it to Isa (Lyon), who would then take it along till Bucharest, where we will meet already on the 18th (I manage to treat my own luggage worse than the Portuguese national airline or Alitalia do…) . Till then, I would only have to keep my ass within EU territory and everything should be ok.

Should, but still wasn’t. Besides the missing cloth and passport, my ID was nowhere to be found. Only after an obviously failed attempt to cross the border only with my driving license, I dug again through “above mentioned mess”, found the ID and was able to keep my journey. Only with my ID, however, we couldn’t leave up to our original plan, as that would mean crossing the Croatian border. So, we were forced into a detour, which actually proved to be as challenging as exciting and fun. Instead of going through Zagreb, we went up north in Slovenia, passed by Maribor and then took an inner road till the Hungarian border close to Lenart. By this time we were driving through roads who were not significant enough to actually be shown in the Michelin’s “Atlante Stradale e Turistico”, so we had a huge time simply guiding us by the name of each village we were crossing. With the feeling that we were never on the right road, but, nevertheless, always moving in the right direction, we reached Hungary around 1 am. From there till Balatonfoldvar were another two delicious hours driving deserted national roads through the Hungarian countryside, under the most amazing sky. I must confess that at a certain time, while going through a long, long straight, I did not resist to kill the light for a couple of seconds and just look up through the open top of my Deuch. What a sight!

Around 3.30 am, we were finally at our destination, after quite a full day, hum? Once again, praise to my Deuch. Another top, top performance, all day (and night) long!

KILOMETRES (Total):	3172km
KM SINCE LAST SPOT:	821km
GAS SPENT(Total):	192.76l

Click here to know all the details of my Legendary Companion