It is with great sadness that we had to leave Budapest Hungary this morning and now we have arrived in Timisoara Romania.

There was this strange situation at the Hungarian -Romanian border with the federal police of Hungary...it seems they did not understand that the transatlantic voyage which we took from Florida to Lisbon Portugal had scanned our passports upon departure and the authorities at the dock in Lisbon told us we did not need an entry stamp into the Schengen zone because we are US citizens....qI insisted on stamps for our passports and they told us that it was just simply not necessary because the cruise ship had already scanned in our passports and ID cards upon departure from Florida and sent it to the authorities in Portugal port of entry.

These Hungarian federal police asked us to get off the train at a little town called Lokosháza. We had to carry our heavy bags about 200 meters into the police station and it took them 90 minutes to complete the paperwork to let us know that it was not our fault and that Portugal had made the error and that they would go ahead and stamp our passports as having entered in Portugal and having left the Schengen zone at the Hungarian Romanian border ...this was a big inconvenience as we had to get off that train and the train continued on to Romania but luckily they put us back on the next train about two hours later and now we finally made it to Romania ....there was no penalty or anything like that and we did not have to pay any fees. Two of the police officers even carried our heavy bags back to the train platform even though I insisted that I wanted to carry it myself because it is good exercise.