Exploring More of Budapest

2007-09-01.Budapest

After breakfast on Saturday morning we took off down the river in the opposite direction than I had taken the day before. The tour books all said that we should hike, or at least take a tour bus, up Gellért Hill, but after one look at it, we decided we would definitely NOT be hiking up that hill. We thought we could always take a bus later if we wanted to.

So we walked along the river, and then crossed one bridge in order to get a better picture of the church that was built into the side of the mountain. We walked through the park a little ways until we got to the entrance of the cave church and then went in to explore. Outside the entrance to the church there was a beautiful view point. After leaving the church we continued to wander through the park. We came to another great vantage point and took some more pictures.

The next hour or so passed the same way until finally we realized that we had climbed to the very top of the hill we had decided not to climb at all! Once we were at the top we both agreed that it had been worth it. The view was spectacular, and we got a great panorama of the city!

That evening we were both tired by the time we got back to the hotel. We decided to grab dinner in the hotel restaurant and then go to bed early. Unfortunately we weren’t able to go to bed quite as early as we’d hoped. When we got off the elevator to go to our room, the hallway was full of hotel staff with mops, buckets, and towels. Apparently there had been a sprinkler malfunction right in front of our room, so we had to wait a bit before we could go back into our room.

Once we were able to get back into our room we were very happy that the sprinklers had not gone off inside, but we realized that water from the hallway had soaked the carpet in front of the door. The hotel staff realized this as well and tried to offer us a new room, but we were tired, and our stuff wasn’t packed up, so we just decided to stay there. We threw some extra towels onto the floor and just tried to avoid that area. The hotel staff couldn’t understand why we would want to stay – Michael had to spend several minutes on the phone trying to make them understand that we weren’t upset and that we didn’t need another room.

We were finally able to get to bed, but by then we weren’t as tired as we thought. We ended up staying up for hours watching movies on cable. We don’t watch television much, so it was fun for us. It was a fabulous, relaxing day.