Day Nine – Friday, June 8 – Vienna to Budapest

There was still a long list of “want to see or do”s in Vienna, but we carved it down to two things we could squeeze in before driving on to Budapest – where we knew there would also be far too many things to see and do for the time we had available.

The famed Lipizzaner stallions do their “morning exercises” on an almost daily basis starting at 10:00AM, so we had an early breakfast and pack and hopped the Metro to the Winter Riding School at the Hofburg. Prior to watching the horses practice parts of their routines, we got a crash course on the Spanish Riding School and the breeding and training of the Lipizzaner horses by touring the small museum across the street. The Winter Riding School room is something to behold if you haven’t seen it. It looks like a typical baroque grand ball room, except that the floor is sawdust and the dancers are horses and their riders. Since the exercises aren’t a full rehearsal for the evening performances, but rather are for strengthening and limbering the horses, we didn’t get to witness the full pageantry of the event or the more acrobatic equine choreography. But you still get a sense of their majesty and discipline even if, like me, you’re not a particular fan of horses (I personally have had a somewhat estranged relationship with horses ever since Tommy Champion got bitten on the thigh by that pack horse in Tuolomne County when I was about 10!).

At around 11:00, we headed back to the hotel, checked out, and drove to the Prater to ride the Riesenrad (giant ferris wheel). The Prater is a huge park with an amusement park section that is now filled with carnival games, roller coasters and water rides that resemble a Six Flags park, but we were only interested in the famous, old ferris wheel that dates back to 1896 and had most of the original cabins burned during WWII in 1945. The cabins are the size of, well…small vacation cabins, or perhaps modern shipping containers. Some of them appeared to be pre-set with dining tables and linens for catered events. We enjoyed the 360 degree views on the slow once-around, then had to say good-bye to Vienna and head out of town around 1:30.

In the parking lot of the Prater, we discovered that the SD Card-based European map database in the Nuvi didn’t cover Hungary…or Croatia! Arrgh! It contains all of Western Europe, UK, Scandanavia and even has Greece and freakin’ Albania! But no Hungary, Croatia or Slovenia on the version 8.0 that we have. Perhaps the later version has added them…don’t know. In any case, we had to wing it with a map, which was OK for the main roads, but got hairy once we arrived in urban Budapest. As part of the “McDonald’s Quest!” we stopped at a roadside exit that had both a gas station and a McD’s and got one of the Austrian specialty burgers.

About 5 miles before the Hungarian border, we got our first speeding ticket in the new car. Oops, but I guess we had to get that out of the way early. Annette got nailed for going 148 KPH in a 100 zone in a speed trap that the Austrian police have clearly set up to extract that last little bit of revenue from travelers before they head over the border, and there was another car that was waived over at the same time.

We arrived in Budapest around 4:30 having realized that not only did the Nüvi offer no help, but we had managed to skip Budapest in our guide book buying, so we had no city map at all upon entering the city. With the help of directions from a cab driver, we were able to get (with only one dead-end street U-turn) over to the Pest side of the city where we finally saw a major hotel where we could stop and get a map and directions. With map in hand and directions in better English, the route to the Marriott Budapest was clear, and only the brutal Friday afternoon traffic delayed us. All told, only about an hour was wasted from arriving in the city limits to getting to the hotel…we figure it could have been much worse.

The Marriott Budapest had been booked via Priceline bidding, and as we had read, the location was fantastic (right on the river on the Pest side, between the Chain Bridge [Széchenyi lánchid] and the Elizabeth Bridge [Erzsébet hid]) and the interior rooms were comfortable and remodeled. The hotel was undergoing a major renovation, but again as in Vienna, there was fortunately no significant noise to contend with.

We enjoyed some wine from the minibar (a reasonably priced wine from a minibar…a first in the history of the hotel business!), and jumped on the Internet to get a quick city overview and some restaurant ideas. We found a place recommended on WikiTravel, and headed off on the #2 Tram, which runs along the Danube river and it took us to a nice, tree-lined neighborhood north of the Margaret Bridge [Margit hid] that seemed to be mostly filled with locals.

The Restaurant was called Pozsonyi Kisvendéglö (on Radnóti Miklós utca 38), and was a qualified success. A large glass of Dreher Beer worked – hard to miss on that, and Paul’s pork goulash was tasty, but Annette’s grilled pike perch, was unfortunately smothered in a pasty lemon sauce that needed to be mostly scraped away to reveal the fish below. The salad had lots of good, mild, crumbly cheese but the cucumbers were a bit bitter. But, a nice atmosphere and we struck up a conversation with a couple next to us (he was British, she was Hungarian) who worked in the film industry and had recently moved back to Budapest from London.

After dinner, we took a short walk up Szent István Ut from the Margaret Bridge, and then strolled back down along the river, enjoying the magnificent views of the lighted Parliament building and Buda Castle across the river. The river walk was not at all crowed, but there were a number of other walkers and several couples enjoying a romantic moment on a bench with champagne or wine and tidbits of food (all with real glass stemware – no plastic cups if you intend to get romantic in Budapest, please!). We walked back to the Marriott and off to bed.