its official we are moving to Romania. The beer is 1 Euro !
Its more expensive to park or drink coffee so we are moving here and living out our life as alcoholics. Not that we arn't already. We parked in a Truck stop last night and made Chilli and Rice and then went to the bar bought a few beers and watched the first episode of a series i'd downloaded before we left. We have about 24 episodes to watch of a couple of series so we need to make them last, 1 episode per week. We also have a few films to watch so will use them when we are really bored. The parking last night was 2.5 Euro and the beer was 1 Euro...amazing. The premium beers were the same price as local so Julie had a Becks and I had something local. I felt so bad only paying 3 Euro for three beers i gave a 1 Euro tip. Their food also looked really nice but i'm not sure i could have ordered it although they all speak pretty good English here.

Guess where we are sending this email from ? Mcdonalds again of course ! The reason for the title is we are in Deva on out way to somewhere we don't quite know where it is. Should be fun.

Finally found a Mcdonalds with power and internet so we can upload a few photos. The battery of the lappy is lasting but a few moments. We need to get another soon. Will look in Turkey and if not try to get one of the Hubb crew in Turkey to get one delivered.

Going to try to post a photo with each Blog entry from now on. Battery permitting.

Got to budapest safe and sound. Did my weekly vehicle checks on the side of the motorway in a service station. Nothing worth noting except i seem to have used 60 litres of diesel where 40 should have done. Need to keep my eye on that but it could be a symptom of trawling round cities in traffic looking for parking spots! the parking with no signs.

We found a really good place in Budapest on the side of the river and the type of view only the adjacent 4 or 5 star hotels have to offer. It actully cost us about 4 hours of parking 1600 HUF (about £4.50). Again the parking warden let us off for the 6 minutes of parking i didn't have the change to purchase. He ticketed the adjacent car for similar.

We met a guy from Somerset this morning (hi Chris) and he pointed us at some free parking up the river where we parked all day for nothing and got the tram into town. Took some time to figure out where to get the tickets for the tram and also to figure out that where the locals park isn't always legal. Parking with your wheels on the mud (actually a park) is illegal but parking right across the pavement is OK. We narrowly missed a ticket as i decided the park wasn't the safest place for the car so moved about 200 meters. Tonight we are really near the UK embassy. We seem to have a habit of putting massive crash barriers infont of our embassies when the others do not. Not sure why we think we are so special. Even the yanks don't have them.

Anyhow as seems to be the way of things the laptop battery is on 5 mins remaining. Its completely knackered. Cya later.

If you go to Wien (Vienna) you may see there are lots of parking spots on the side of the road and lots of small car parks. These are all devoid of signs of any description. There are lots of signs saying you cannot park between certain times in certain areas but none saying when you can park or where. So, after 3 hours of trawling round we found a small park near an undergound station and near a main train station. Julie skipped off into the station to find out whats what. We had already deduced that you need to get a scratch card like Bratislava and you get these from the train station or Tabac. Julie came back from the station even more confused so i went in and asked the same questions and got the same none answer. I then went to the Police station and got a reasonable answer. Parking charges were 9am to 10pm anywhere and is in zones (about 15 or so of them). Depending on which zone you are in means you need a different colour scratch card. Simples....not really. On my return to the car Julie was panicing as the warden was coming. We both jumped on him and luckily he spoke very good English and explained all. You can only park for two hours anywhere ! This was at around 5pm so we needed to park for 5 hours and this was impossible. The nice warden then said "don't worry about it, as this was his patch and we could park all night for free". Result and after only 3 hours ! So we parked and rode into town. Doncaster council would have been proud of us, except they don;t charge £3.70 for the short Journey. Only Doncaster have that expensive honour.

To save the hassle of parking again we are leaving Wien(a). On a side note if you ever come here in a car go to a Hotel and pay around £4.50 for a 24 hour parking permit that allows you in the 2 hour places for 24 hours ! Go figure....

BTW. I will post some photos soon. Honest.

Parked outside a church for the night, found a Irish Pub with Wi-Fi and a nice local beer and not I'm drinking Guiness. Worried about the vehicle again being on the side of a road even if its outside a church. According to lonely planet Slovakia is pretty safe even by UK standards and probably safer. We are getting better at locking up the car and using the security we have in place to full effect. The centre cubby is rammed full of all things of any value, not that there is much of value just cables and crap as most of the stuff is in my bag with us and not in the car.

We attracted the interest of a Policeman on the motorway but we have no idea if he was lasering us or looking for the Vignette on the car. So far we have had to buy two Vignettes for about 17 Euro combined which is pretty good considering they cover all the motorways for 10 days each. They also look cool in the windscreen and will certainly fox an Africa copper hell bent on insurance, roax tax or something a nice hologram sticker can be explained as "thats it there".

I should have got a new laptop the battery is lasting only an hour. Battery management of all the devices is causing stress......we are having lots of practice charging them up and had had to buy a three way (not the ones you get in prague),,,,, adapter for the 12V.