Local train along Lake Balaton in Hungary

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When you’re really in the groove of a long trip, your former life sort of dissolves away into distant memories and you find yourself very comfortable in the local surroundings. You notice more details in the passing scenery, you develop a taste for the local food, and you let the odd place names glimpsed on signs fill your heart with wonder. “What’s that place like…?” So it was for Masayo and I today as we moved from Budapest into the heart of Hungary, and to a small town on the edge of Central Europe’s largest lake, Lake Balaton.

Our destination was the teeny town of Balatongyörök (most of the villages in this area begin with “Balaton-“). We were planning on taking a train there. It would be a relaxing and very pleasant day looking at some arresting Hungarian scenery. My diabetes even behaved quite well for most of the day – until my after-dinner problem returned and ruined my perfect streak.

I had some terrible blood sugar experiences in Budapest but overall I think I’m doing better with my readings. It’s those after-dinner ones that are the most consistently bad. But as I always say, bad BG on a scenic old Hungarian train rattling along under orange and yellow trees is better than bad BG back in my living room.

For breakfast, we awoke on our last morning in Elvis Guesthouse in Budapest, where Masayo fashioned French toast from some leftover eggs and round bread we had in our little private kitchen. This is a really nice hostel and I’ll miss it, but other destinations pull us ever forward. It was 7:30 am and my blood sugar was 118. A perfect way to begin the day.

We gathered our stuff (you get good at that when you do it so often, although I still worry that one day I’ll forget my insulin in a refrigerator) and checked out. We caught a Metro train to Déli pályaudvar station, which is also the location of the bigger Budapest-Déli station. We bought tickets and sat down for a 45-minute wait.

Balatongyörök lies on the northwestern edge of the long, thin Lake Balaton. The lake is a kind of summer resort area; I wasn’t sure how lively it’d be here in chilly December. There’s a larger town called Keszthely nearby but I chose Balatongyörök because the guesthouse I found on booking.com, Villa Astoria, was a good deal and claimed to have free bicycles to use.

Actually, much of today consisted of trains, which means there was a great feeling of movement and also that I was quite contented: motion is always exciting. I hoped it would relax my blood sugar but of course you never know; you always have to check and recalibrate.

The coach from Budapest took us to Székesfehérvár, one of many interestingly-named places we got to ride by. The more diacritical marks a place has, the more I like it. (I still fondly recall Kroměříž in the Czech Republic from a couple of weeks ago…) Near Székesfehérvár we got our first look at Lake Balaton. The sun was glinting off the great flat waters, and the far edge was too distant to be seen from the train. It looked like a remarkably placid oceanside. The trees, too, were beautiful: alternating green and yellow/red/orange, with many bare.

In our little open booth on the train, which had but a few people on it, I checked my BG and it was 138. Still pretty good – will I have a perfect BG day? I wondered. (No, I wouldn’t. Sigh.) I took a Humalog shot and ate a cinnamon roll as a snack. Those things are sold in every train station and market in Hungary, it seems like.

Behind me, an older guy was drinking a beer and gazing at the lake slipping slowly by us. He would speak with himself sometimes, then turn and try to engage Masayo and I, trying to explain something about the lake in a kind of slurred (and non-English) way. We smiled and nodded but didn’t really understand. Finally at one stop he rose, gave us a smooth red and yellow apple, and sauntered off the train.

People in Hungary have been especially friendly to us on this trip.

Eventually our train stopped at its terminus, a station called Tapolca (pronounced, I think, “tah poltsa”). We changed to the last train of the day, a very small one bound for Balatongyörök and not much farther.

Passing along the edge of Lake Balaton for a few minutes, we finally arrived at Balatongyörök. There was a sense of pride and accomplishment in making it here: it felt far away from civilization but we’d made it by relying on our own wits. And there didn’t seem to be many other people around; the train dropped us off and pulled out, slipping around a bend and leaving us in the quiet serenity – and thrillingly unknown – air of the village.

Villa Astoria was a 1.6-km walk from the station up, through the town which seemed to consist of a few well-kept little houses and no stores. (We did pass one small grocery on the way, but that’s all.) Masayo was tired and struggled during the walk. She needs a rest, especially since yesterday in Budapest had included so much walking and hiking.

Our guesthouse is particularly lovely. Villa Astoria is a small house next to a large flat area of farmland. The green fields stretched between small colorful buildings, out of which smoke occasionally rose. Our second-floor room was on the small size, but it was cozy and had a porch that looked out westward towards the fields and the setting Hungarian sun. All the furniture, and the little house itself, seemed brand new. The owner of the guesthouse, an earnest and capable middle-aged man, endeavored mightily to take care of us.

We hadn’t had a real lunch, so Masayo rested in the room while I walked back through town to the little grocery we’d passed to get some pre-dinner snacks. Again I saw almost nobody in town, but the grocery was indeed still open when I got there and I got some crackers, cheese, and chocolate milk. Nature’s perfect snack.

The snacks were good and helped Masayo feel a little better. The guesthouse owner told us of a restaurant in town on an obscure side street, and did indeed have a pair of bicycles for us to use. He told us how to get there and it was a good thing – we never would have known about this place without his help.

The restaurant was called Magyaros Csárdás and seemed to be literally the only place in town open for dinner. And in fact it gave us one of the finest meals we’ve had on this entire trip so far. There were no other diners, but the inside of the small room was decorated with a large numbers of Hungarian folk art and crafts – plates painted with flowers and coats of arms, red and white cups – plus reminders of the surrounding natural Hungarian countryside in the form of stuffed animal heads.

The meal, too, was rather astonishing, especially given the long day getting here and the feeling that we were in a really untouristy place. I had fresh venison with fried potatoes and cranberry sauce, plus a large mug of draft beer. It was served on a white plate with a red painted Hungarian pattern on it. I took my shot through my Bluff Works pants at the table and dug in. Filling, not expensive, and a perfect end to the day.

The bicycle ride in the dark was very cold, and the yard lights on houses in the residential streets around the restaurant were the only signs of life. Potatoes often destroy my BG and the fried ones I’ve had in Central Europe have proven hard to guess the carbs of. I hoped the bike ride would take the edge off any notions of getting high that diabetes might be entertaining.

By 8:00 pm I found I’d done pretty good: I was 172, which I think is acceptable after a meal like that.

But after that it went bad: at 11:00 my previous glucose reading had reversed its numbers and I was now 271. My first reading over 200 of the day. Another couple units of Humalog would have been perfect at dinner. Something to think about next time.

I took a couple units, plus my Lantus shot, and we hit the sack. The bed had super thick covers on it and we were quite cozy and warm, in a cold, dark, quiet, friendly village in an obscure part of Hungary. Tomorrow we can get out and explore some more of the area but for tonight we could just smile on our pillows and dream of the small-town wonders of Balatongyörök.

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