A Brief Overview of Budapest

Well, Budapest is probably not on my “Top 5,” but this could be due to the fact I feel like we only saw 25% of the city.  On Thursday, the road trip to Vienna took 9 hours!!  TWO HOURS consisted of staus (i.e. traffic jams/accidents) on the autobahn.  Then on Friday, SAME THING…traffic was horrible.  We attribute this traffic congestion to everyone traveling for the long Easter holiday, but it was painful (EVERYTHING was closed on both Friday and Monday). 

When we arrived to Budapest, we drove to the location where our apartment was supposed to be…well, that location was ONLY where the keys were located!  Then, we had to reload and drive to our actual apartment.  By the time that we, and the Bells, reached the actual apartment we had already missed our pre-arranged wine tour in the Budapest caves.  Then we decided to just walk around the city, but guess what, I forgot A COAT!!!  And, this would not have been a problem if it were not wet and FREEZING!  Though, we were not going to let these obstacles get us down!!  It was Meredith’s birthday and we were at least going to find a nice Hungarian restaurant for dinner- task accomplished:).  We then went back to our 4-bedroom apartment, put the kids to bed and played “Beans” and drank wine.   We could all say that our day had not gone as planned, but it was still very enjoyable.

On Saturday, we toured the Budapest Cathedral & the “Hospital in the Rock” and enjoyed a 1.5 hour-long river cruise along the Danube River. The weather was still cold, but not as cold as on Friday so that was an improvement.

On Sunday, the girls were pleasantly surprised that the Easter Bunny had found us in Budapest and even hid eggs scattered around the apartment.  He must have found the apartment easier than we did:)!  It was so cute, Elle said, “can you believe the Easter Bunny found us in Spain!!”  Well Elle, that was last week…but you are definitely going to have a head start on geography when you start Kindergarten!   I cannot blame her for not always knowing what country we are in:)!!  After the kids enjoyed their Easter Baskets, we talked to the children about the true meaning of Easter.  The kids had a lot of questions, but they were good to think through and answer in “kid language.”  After our Easter celebrations, we had to hurry and pack up since our time change had occurred at midnight.  We loaded up and made a 9-hour car ride back to Germany!! 

So as you can tell, we did not have near enough time in Budapest to fully appreciate it.  The city reminded me a little of Prague and the parts of the city we did see were beautiful.  Though we needed more time, it was nice traveling with our good friends and seeing one more country before heading back to the USA in just 3 weeks.  Matt flew to the USA early Monday and will be gone throughout the weekend.  So, we will have to figure out what we want to do with only two more weekends in Europe…our adventure is almost completed.