Getting Ready for the Next One – Hungary awaits

Greetings friends and colleagues with a short post to confirm that Jutta and I are looking forward to heading out to Hungary later this month with Daisy2 in the back of our VW together with the solo I used to call Raven – realising now she’s actually a Thorn Nomad.

This post is by way of a test of the new website, designed and consolidated by Dan Williams of TigerFinch, fresh from a complete and very successful rebuild of our EMDR Focus business site.

Lovely new crash helmets in the image above hanging in our hall ready for service, mine having had to be replaced after wearing a helmet probably – again – saved my life the other day when I wetn flying over a new and un-alerted speed bump outside our local Tescos in Sheringham. Knocked out briefly, just thankfully just a shaking.

This time, we’re taking our new VW Rosie2 (well, second-hand after Rosie1 was shunted terminally on a Welsh roundabout earlier in the year) all the way across Europe to Southern Hungary, parking her with my (Mark’s) Hungarian language teacher David ready for Jutta and myself to pedal on down the Danube to Belgrade.

(Dávid tells me that the Hungarian for to pedal is, usefully, pedálozni. So, pédalozunk tovább Belgrád felé a Dunán mentén….)

Life being what it is, Rosie2’s windscreen came to grief within days of her being delivered to us, smashed by a cobblestone-size projectile on the motorway as we headed to Liverpool for the EMDR UK national conference last month. Picture illustrates the two lovely lads who came out to us to put a new one in.

From Belgrade, Jutta and I cycle on to Romania and Transylvania, introducing Jutta for the first time to where my covering the 1989 revolution didn’t just topple the Ceausescus but in due course our marriage with it, though thankfully said marriage turned out to have a better afterlife than that of Nicolae and Elena…

After Dropping in on Dracula, my Nomad will take over as I immerse myself more deeply in the Hungarian language for a while, then cycle slowly solo to the UK helped by the following wind of the new electrics while Jutta and Rosie2 potter gently back through Germany visiting old friends and family.

Daisy2 is of course already electrified, as is also now my solo, thanks to the wonderfully focused ministrations of the totally brilliant Nik Heathman at Thorn Cycles in Bridgwater. Pictures to illustrate of both as I took delivery last month. Note the huge Pendix battery, of which we now have three for the trip.

From here, I’ll experiment with some generic images from the last few weeks, as an intro to getting the blog going again, hopefully in the new design with less compiling heartache and a lot more accessibility (or hozzáférhetés) for those zillions of friends and family out there who may (or rather may not be) gagging to catch up with every new entry.

On which concluding note, if you were following my old blog, every chance that record got lost in the transition, so feel free to sign up again if you like.