Sarajevo, Busovaca

Many restaurants in Yugoslavia have a whole sheep or lamb on a large rotisserie, right along the street. Emmy went in and asked for a sandwich. We used the dictionary and showed them “take out.” The man cut a big slab of meat and put a large chunk of bread in the sack, all for about $3. Seemed expensive in this economy, but we don’t know what the locals pay.

We didn’t look around all that much, but Sarajevo was not a great tourist place as far as we could see, in spite of the fact the Winter Olympics were held a couple of years earlier. After we left the city, I remembered there was a marker in Sarajevo where on June 28, 1914 Archduke Franz Ferdinand was shot, starting WW I. We wish we had remembered earlier.

We needed some fluid for the automatic transmission so a mechanic wrote down the name we should ask for at the government gas stations. When we arrived at the service station nearby, the mechanic was there to make sure no one misunderstood what we needed. So kind of him to do that.

As we pulled out of the station, we heard a loud clank, and saw a sad sight. A little old truck had just broken in two, just in back of the cab, and was sitting, in two pieces, in the middle of the Sarajevo street. Poor man. Nothing worse than major mechanical problems, this was more than major, this was fatal.

We stopped at a large rest area and had lunch and rested a while. We could see some smoke up ahead, and soon the smoke changed to yellow and other colors, and we decided we didn’t need problems with some unknown poison smoke.

We didn’t care where we were anyhow, so turned around and took the long rough narrow country road through several small towns. In Busovaca we found a large, rather new hotel with several restaurants, operated by the Yugoslavian government. The campsite was on a grassy area in back of the hotel. I went in and counted at least 100 people in the half-full restaurants. And the menu prices were not cheap either.

In the morning the weather was very foggy. Yugoslavian farmers use horse drawn wagons and carts in this area. At one place it looked like grandpa and grandma in the driver’s seat, with several grandchildren along for the ride. We would see many people walking along the side of the road, then we would see a bus stop, so maybe they are just going to catch a bus.