Oh I forgot, I hadnt finished. Had to rush off - [..] - but have long since come back. So, the lie:
"- I spent a night in a convent, a castle, a truck's cargo space and a lighthouse"
I did spend a night in a convent, in some small Slovak town [Spisske Podhradie] with a beautiful castle-ruin but without, as Stasia and I were to find out, any hotel. There was a cheap workers' hostel but they didnt have place. So we trekked around town in the evening for an hour or two before we knocked on the doors of the big monastery/convent/church settlement there - as if this were some 19th century novel. But sure enough, thank their good Christian heart, they put us up for the night, in the convent. Very stern, those rooms, I must admit. But the nuns sounded very cheerful, singing early in the morning ... :-)
Twice I took my gf to stay in a castle for her birthday (different gf's, mind you). There was this fairy-tale castle in the east of Holland, in the winter, with a walk in the snow-covered forest the next morning. (Cost me a rib outa my body though, I must admit.) And two years ago I took Staz to stay over at the Esterhazy Palace in Hungary. Now thats a true recommendation! Its far out in a village in the West, but its the most amazing castle. They call it the Hungarian Versailles, with good reason. Very run-down, though - it was used as stables and the like in Communist times. They've been restoring for years now.
The "hotel" rooms are in the left wing, and are surprisingly under-capitalized, lets say. That is, the rooms are comfortable enough but the place otherwise has all the trappings of a youth hostel; they are dirt cheap, sthing like $7 a night; and the tip is therefore to reserve way in advance, but: no-one in the place speaks anything but Hungarian. Somebody who picks up the phone in the museum speaks German, but he can't do any bookings. Cost me a lot of phonecalls and refreshing what I'd once known of Hungarian to get it arranged! But, you are welcomed warmly (if incomprehensibly), and you have a view of the famed, beautiful gardens, and yeh, the castle ... amazing. I'll post a picture later.
(Its all the more special if you read up about it; the Esterhazy's were the nouveaux riches of the Hungarian nobility, and eager to outdo everyone else; and so they did. Their castle was at first ridiculed, being out in the swamps where no-one came; but soon, famous composers played to an array of guests in soon-to-be legendary parties that made the palace rival Vienna's own royal residencies. It's funny because the next night we moved on to the erstwhile Szechenyi residency, and the two represent day and night in Hungarian history: Szechenyi the stern, rational, sobre patron of railways and waterworks, Eszterhazy the light-mooded, easy-spending patron of composers and poets).
Truck cargo space was when I was hitchhiking to Germany to meet up with a holiday love, some 10 years ago ... she'd told me the ride would be no more than 8 or 10 hours, so out I went in the morning, and quickly got stuck near the Dutch-German border. By the time I got to Berlin, on 2/3rds of the way, it was night. The trucker who gave me my last ride parked his truck underneath a bridge, uncoupled the front part, in which he drove away, from the cargo space, inside which he let me sleep the night ...
But the lighthouse - I didnt make that one. It was going to be another present to my then-gf, the year after the castle, for our anniversary - some three/four years ago. Somewhere in the north here someone bought a lighthouse and turned it into a one-room hotel. It sounded really cool, but we split up before we got to go there.
OK, thanks guys, this was fun, telling stories - I hope any of you who might have had the time to read them, enjoyed them, at all ... <smiles>
Here's the Eszterhazy palace:
TMI (To Much Information) 
