Prologue
Birth is quickly followed by a flurry of celebrations: first birthday, second birthday, third birthday. In these early years every birthday is worth celebrating. But by eighteen the novelty is wearing off and the celebrations begin to slow. You might get to celebrate a twenty-first birthday, a wedding, a house-warming but the celebrations get spaced out further and further. Turning fifty, the big five-0, is an arbitrary line in the sand. It doesn’t mean anything much it itself but as the distances between occasions to celebrate become greater it takes on new meaning. After fifty there's a risk that the next noteworthy moment in life may be The End so we may as well make the most of celebrating this one. As friends of a similar age planned their half century celebrations, I pondered how I might mark my fiftieth. I toyed with a variety of ideas, rolling them around in my mind like pebbles, and eventually, over time, percolated down to the idea of cycling through Hungary. The i...