A Hungary quickie

Our wet Slovakian weather continued and glued us to the inside of the van waiting for sunshine.

Eventually Jack got bored and said we may as well be driving so we continued south through more Pennsylvania look-alike terrain.

As we approached the Hungarian border the sky suddenly brightened and so did we.

Where we can park the van makes a big difference in how we experience a city. In Budapest we found the perfect place on the edge of the city and near both the bus and the metro. In minutes we were at stop #1 on the self-guided audio tour I downloaded. This has been my approach here in Europe. If there’s a free walking tour we take that, or if there’s a free-to-download audio guide we do that.

We started with a walk through an enormous city park where we searched for statues of Bela Lugosi, George Washington and a tiny Dracula.

We appreciated the beautiful weather after the rain we’d had the last few days.

Budapest is huge and there’s more than you could possibly see in a year, let alone a day, but top of my list was the central market, a restored Neolithic hall where I could have spent a week and a lot of money. Markets are always my happy place.

Jack indulges my love of markets but he does occasionally need to be fueled with coffee and a pastry. We found this fun cafe with a choice of international brews. We didn’t do a taste test but we did rest our legs for the next stint.

Why is there a statue of TV detective Columbo in the middle of Budapest?

We wanted to visit the Holocaust Memorial Park but the area was closed for security reasons and we could only photograph the Emanuel Tree through the fence. Each leaf bears the name of a local Holocaust victim and I’m disappointed we didn’t get to see it close up.

Much of our visit to Budapest was about finding public art. We sought out this memorial to Swiss diplomat Carl Lutz who saved more than 60,000 Jews from the Nazis by creating safe houses and providing transit documents. He was awarded “Righteous Among the Nations” by the state of Israel.

Oh sure, we should be eating traditional Hungarian food, but when we find eggs Benedict, we have to go for it.

There were so many more places we wanted to visit in Budapest but our feet gave out before our desire to see them all. Down at the river we thought we might book a sunset cruise but it was right out of our budget. So we settled for a beer.

Prague, Krakow, Budapest. We’ve loved them all and they all deserve more than a quick visit. Some day maybe we’ll be back. But the calendar reminds us we have a long way to go and a dwindling number of Schengen days to get there.

We drove south and parked in a beautiful field. Tomorrow we head for the Romanian border.