Novi Sad, Serbia, There and Back Again

We took a trip to Serbia for a conference with a group of friends. On our initial trip we drove through Bosnia and saw some of the war damage as well as some of the rebuilding. It took 13 hours to get to the camp where the conference was held, and was mostly without incident. Our final destination was near Novi Sad, the home city for some of our group. One evening we took a walk around the city and snapped a few shots.

The return trip we took a different route, traveling through Belgrade to drop off one of our group to visit his uncle. This ride should have taken about 10 hours, but it winded up lasting about 15. Apparently there is a regulation that mini-buses need to stop every four hours for half an hour so that the driver can rest. We also needed to make frequent potty stops (there were a dozen of us, and one was a small child). As we were driving up a mountain, we saw several guys pushing their car up, so we stopped and roped them to us, and pulled them until we came to a gas station. When we were about an hour from home we came upon an accident, where a driver flipped his vehicle and then wasn't able to feel his legs. We had to wait while the police extracted him from his vehicle. Apparently, this is usually a job for the fire department, but this town no longer had a fire department because in a case of tragic irony, their building had burned down (this reminded us of seeing a minor accident involving a car labeled "auto school"). Until the ambulance came and took the victim to hospital, and the police cleared the wreckage, we were there at least another hour. Then we drove home through many tunnels (I counted at least 33) of different length and droppped off people at there homes and we finally got to our home at 2 in the morning.