Day One, 5:30 PM: Somewhere in Slovakia...

Okay, we're on the road now. Not that there's anything really special about that at this point; I estimate that we'll be spending about 27 hours per day on the road over the next week. It's the stops in between that will count. Here's what's been going on so far:

At roughly 9:00 AM, we landed at the Ferighy Airport in Budapest. Our little school-bus-with-wings spat us out into two standing-room-only buses, which then took us to the terminal. Of course, as an experienced Egged rider, I had no problem with the bus. Once in the terminal, I got through passport control without any problems, Baruch Hashem. I even got a smile from the border control agent for saying "thank you very much" in Hungarian. Baggage claim, on the other hand, was another story for another time, but we managed.

Once out of the terminal, we met our tour guides, Akiva and Reuven, and loaded up our bus.

We took a brief drive through Budapest (brief, because or real visit to Budapest will be on Sunday), eventually visiting a money changer where we each changed about $10 into Forint, the local currency. The Hungarian Forint is one of those near-useless foreign currencies where one US dollar is equivalent to like 63,000,000,000,000,000 units of local currency, although the government plans on dealing with that by switching to the Euro eventually.

After changing money, we went to some local shops in the area, including one little Jewish shop selling products imported from Israel, to by some food and soda. I personally didn't buy anything, since I brought plenty of supplies with me from Israel. So at the moment, I still have all 2,260 of my Hungarian Forint in my pocket, and unless I spend it when we come back on Sunday, I'm gonna have some pretty useless souvenirs. (At least the Euro can be used in other countries; the Forint can only be used in Hungary.)

Anyway, after finishing with the food stores, we said goodbye to Reuven (our local Hungarian guide) until Sunday, and got onto the bus with Akiva (our imported guide from Israel) to begin heading north to Poland, via Slovakia. It's supposed to be an eight hour trip, so don't be surprised if I'm still on the bus in 13 hours or so.

Many of us begin to drop off to sleep as the bus meanders north toward the border, eventually finding Slovakia almost by accident (plus the driver has a GPS unit that keeps yakking in either Russian or Ukrainian. Or both. I don't know and I don't really care). We crossed the border without any incident whatsoever for the very simple reason that there wasn't, technically speaking, anyone guarding the border. There was just an empty booth and some signs, and presto! - we were in Slovakia.

Shortly thereafter, at about 1:30 PM, we pulled over at a gas station to stretch our legs and daven mincha.

Some of us also took advantage of the opportunity to get some food out of the storage area beneath the bus and eat some lunch.

After that, we got back on the bus, and have been on it ever since. We did stop a few times - a couple of times at gas stations for directions or something, and once because a really bored cop decided he wanted to see all our passports, but gave up after like the fifth one - but we didn't actually get off or do anything special since mincha. We've been mostly sleeping, reading, learning, planning the next Slovakian revolution, etc. - nothing too major.

Assuming we haven't actually reached the North Pole by tonight, we should be in Lizhensk, Poland, just in time for the yahrtzeit of Rebbe Elimelech. And that's when the interesting part really starts. Meanwhile, we can just wait.

Tick, tock, tick, tock...