8 Days On The Road - and still counting - Part 1

 Things are opening up here, and we have an audit to do.  So last Monday - July 19 we left beautiful Maribor and headed east.  To avoid holiday traffic, we went a bit north towards Varazdin and crossed at a little border station for local traffic.   No worries.  Just before we got to Varazdin, we stopped to readjust Google maps, and Liz was enthralled by this field.

It turns out that sunflowers are a major crop in places besides and Nebraska and Ohio.

And if I turned a little to the left, this is the view.

The building is just another one of the numerous, never-ending, top of every hill, castles/churches in this country.  Ho hum.  The structure under the hilltop seems to be there to stabilize the stone face.  There are dozens of tension bolts in it, too.

So, we drove south to Zagreb, then east to Osijek, our first Croatian home, where we took the Elders assigned there to lunch.  They wanted pizza, which is quite good in these parts.

Then we continued east to the huge city of Beograd, Serbia.  It has a building that stood out a bit as we entered town.  I have no idea what it is for, but it does stand out..

Serbia is noticeably poorer than Croatia, but the city did have things to offer.  We had reserved a hotel room near the center of town - it was rated 9 out of 10.  The rooms was missing most of the lightbulbs in the lamps.  There were water stains on the ceiling and it was raining.  And the balcony we had paid extra for, turned out to be a glassed room inside the room with a raised floor, and a sunscreen outside the windows that made so we couldn't see out.  So we called the manager and told her we weren't going to stay.  She didn't even argue.

  The audit department of the church says to stay in hotels equivalent to Holiday Inn.  We found that hotels are surprisingly expensive in Beograd, but we found a Holiday Inn with one room left and booked it.  It was a little higher than the other hotels near by, but that isn't a problem, right?  We drove through the rain and heavy traffic ( perrenial problem there) to the hotel and checked in.  The staff gave us huge smiles and jumped at our every whim.  That was surprising.  The room had a very comfortable larger-than-Kingsize bed, a huge bathroom with a jetted tub big enough for an orgy (but no shower.)  It had a balcony that stretched out over the hotel entrance.  Beyond that there was the top of the hotel's tower, with a door to a private sunroom inside.  The room came with bathrobes, slippers, and chocolate bonbons on the pillows.  So we decided to stay 3 nights.  The price was $150 American per night, not the Serbian price we expected.  Trust me, $150 is a huge sum for anything in the still mostly Communist country of Serbia.  We thought about finding something less expensive, but we were bushed, so we stayed.  Ahhhh, yes.

The currency in Serbia is the Dinar.  It is worth about 1 cent.  We spent a LOT of Dinars, but not much money there.  There are dinar coins in 50, 25, 10, 5 and 1, just like with dollars and Euros.  The locals are happy to get those coins, but the official audit policy for Serbia is to round to the closest dinar and forget the cents.  After all, a Dinar cent is worth 1/100th of  a 100th of a dollar.

Next morning we did the Beograd Branch audit, and then the Beograd District audit.  That afternoon we had time to see the sights with the other senior couples.  There is an amazingly large fortress at the curve of the river where the Drava joins the Danube.  It is largely  intact, which is amazing.  If you look closely at the river to the right of the photo you will see a bridge support in the middle of the river.  The locals say the Americans blew up the bridge.  No, no, it was NATO!

This is the fortress from across the Danube River.

And here is the central keep, up close.  It is a museum and park now, and there were lots of people strolling through it.  I wore my camera on a strap so everybody would know I was a tourist.

Here we are by the flowers.  I carry a cane for use on stairs and rough ground.  After walking this far, I was leaning on it almost all the time - and that makes my knees sorer than they were.

The wall in the background is interesting.  It has been re-built using masonry from several previous versions.  The red bricks are Roman.  Those Romans were very clever!  I thought I had a closeup photo of that wall, but it appears to have vaporized.

Beograd was bombed by NATO forces trying to stop the Yugoslavian Civil War.  People here say it was the Americans, and it probably was.  Quite a few members of the church left the church after NATO bombed them, and there is some resentment, although it didn't affect us in any way.  There is a ruined building in town that is just a shell due to the bombing, and it is maintained as a monument to their suffering.

  We had dinner with the other seniors and got back to the hotel late, exhausted.

On Wednesday the 21st, we drove north to Novi Sad where we audited the Novi Sad branch.  Elder Johnson is branch president of this branch as well as the one in Sremska Mitrovica, and we had hoped to do them both that day.  But he didn't get my emails (sent to junk mail), so we weren't able to do that, and decided to do one of them the next day.

   Back in Beograd, we met the young missionaries and took them to dinner.  They chose a pizza place. next to an amazing church.  What is amazing about it is that Russia is paying to build it.  Putin came to see it a couple of times.  Clearly it is a propaganda opportunity to show them how much better Russia is than us dratted Americans, but who knew Russia would encourage the Serbs with a fabulous new church?  It is Eastern Orthodox, which is closely allied with the Russian Orthodox church.

The front door.

Since the church isn't open, yet, there is a booth where people can light prayer candles for those who need it.  The guy kneeling there had a bucket full of candles.  He must know lots of needy people.

I saw this pretty girl at the side of the church.

And here are some photos of the inside.  There is no doubt that it is very impressive.

And here are the young missionaries at their pizza feast.

Thursday, July 22  This was a travel day, with a stop in Sremska.  The road signs are interesting in Serbia.  The official alphabet is Cyrillic, but signs often have latin, English, Turkish, or Croatian translations.  English was very common.  The freeway signs seem to be at the whim of the community named.

Sremska Mitrovica, Serbia is a small town and fun to visit.  The centar was only two blocks long, and here is the entrance.

The elders there also wanted pizza when we offered to take them to lunch.  After the audit and lunch we pressed on.  We crossed back into Croatia, and then headed south into Bosnia to go to Banja Luka.  The border crossing was no problem, as usual, but it is on a narrow bridge, so it moved painfully slow.

  One thing we could see from the bridge was a series of three gold domes on a church on the other side.

These two photos are of the same church, but one on the sunny side, and the other in the shade.  The stripes are interesting.

    We arrived in Sremska at about 6:00 pm.  That one was difficult.  The internet was going in and out, and part way through the audit, repairmen arrived to check it out.  They were disconnecting cables to test the impact, and they pulled the plug on us several times.  Add to that, we had some young elders who had already left and didn't know what they were doing.  In addition, they hadn't organized the paperwork very well, and when the new elders arrived they cleaned the place, apparently throwing away some of the documents we are supposed to keep for 10 years.  All this meant we finished the audit at about 9:30 - after the elders bed time.  No pizza for them, I am sorry to say.  We were exhausted once again.  We found our hotel and collapsed.

Don't miss the next exciting episode!