As always on the road, there are technical issues.  I did not bring my laptop because heavy, but it probably would have been easier to deal with a lot of the blogging, especially the photos.  My phone is supposed to send all its photos to the Photo Stream, where my iPad is supposed to see them, and from where I can insert them easily into this blog.

This has not happened this morning, and I have a lot of photos.  At the moment I’m trying to upload them to the blog straight from the phone.  The much-vaunted superior internet speeds of Europe apparently do not apply to wifi on cruise ships.  (It doesn’t help that we’re at the bottom of a lock at the moment.)

So, day 2: Budapest.  We had moored under the Chain Bridge, across from the palace in the Castle District.

We loaded onto the buses and off we went for a quick tour of both Pest and Buda.  Pest is the western, flat, business/downtown.  Buda is the mountainous residential/palace/fortress eastern side of the river, as seen above.

Our tour guide was voluble and passionate about his country’s history, a large portion of which he shared with us.  Constantly.  At an excited pitch.  (We had these nifty little lavaliers that allowed us to hear what he was saying without having to crowd around him and listen to him yell.  He could do it straight into our ears.)

Indeed, Hungary’s history is ancient and proud, both conquered and conquerors.

This is Hero’s Square, built in 1896 to celebrate the millennium of the kingdom of Hungary.  1,000 years, folks.  You can’t see them, but there are statues of all our favorite kings in the arcade, between the columns.  We learned about every single one of them.

After being driven all over Pest, it was time to head over to the Buda side, up to the Castle District.  Our goal was Mathias Church:

Like much of Europe, Budapest was hit hard during WWII.  Mathias Church was 80% destroyed by advancing Soviet troops, Hungary having made the unfortunate choice to join the Axis.  Everything is a reconstruction of the neogothic cathedral.

Here’s the inside:

Here are two fun details: I liked this window, and I wish that Joszeph had stopped to take a breath so I could ask him about it:

Also, one of the kings— I don’t think it was Mathias — had the nickname of Corvinus, i.e., crow, and so one wall has his emblem all over it.

Yes, he has a ring in his mouth.

Here’s the outside of the church, on the ramparts build in 1896 as part of that whole 1,000-year-old thing:

After this we had about an hour to wander around.  Quaint, etc.  Walking up the street to the church, I had seen a sign with an arrow:

LABIRINTUS

So of course we went to find it.

It was not what I thought.

The entire hill is catacombed, and apparently this is their biggest tourist attraction. Oy.

Let me say at this point that as marvelous as the Viking River Cruise is –and it’s pretty dang marvelous — it is not traveling.  It’s touring.  We did not get see any museums, nor the palace, nor did we really have time to shop.  Because we had to be back at the ship to sail to Vienna, there was no option to get tickets to the opera or ballet, or to shop with any kind of deliberation.

So either spend your whole week impulse shopping, or resigning yourself not to shop at all, because you will not be looping back to pick up that artwork you admired in the first gallery you stopped at.

Since we were spending the rest of the day sailing up the Danube (our longest stretch on the water), Viking kept us busy with all kinds of little activities: an explanation of how the boat works, a lecture on Viennese coffeehouse culture (for the love of God don’t order a coffee), a captain’s toast, a lecture on Mozart, etc.

In your cabin, the TV gives you the itinerary and the weather, plus all kinds of other helpful stuff, plus there’s a daily newsletter of the next day’s schedule, placed on your bed during dinner.  There’s also a “port briefing” before dinner, given by the always-entertaining Sorin.

Our cabin is at the water line; no balcony for us.  The first time you look out your window, it’s a bit disturbing.

Otherwise, the journey is picturesque.

Someone’s old estate, now clearly divided into apartments, given the number of satellite dishes sprouting from the walls like so many mushrooms.

Esztergom, Hungary: the basilica is the largest church in Hungary.

Meanwhile, I’m exploring my inner Eurotrash.

I’ve always thought that Hans Gruber was tragically misunderstood.

The biggest excitement of the evening was our first lock.  No, I had no idea the Danube was dammed, but it is, somewhere between Esztergom and Bratislava.  We all went up to watch.

It is very impressive.

While we stood there and watched, we rose up to the top of that wall.

Mostly we were fascinated by how close we were to the wall.

I had happened through the lounge during the nautical lecture, so I knew that the ship has four engines, all rotatable 360°, but it was still alarming to see the captain standing at the rail keeping an eye on things.

Finally the gate opened, and we sailed on.

Back in the lounge, the musician got progressively more unbearable — just play your piano, Christo, and leave all the prerecorded trax out of it — so I went up top, where I realized that there ought to be a moon, a little past full.

I finally found it, rising over the river aft.

You might be forgiven for thinking that international travel on your birthday was a glamorous thing. Let me correct that impression.

First of all, if you’re headed east, to Europe, you lose hours. You leave Atlanta at 10:30 pm the night before your birthday, and by the time you land in Amsterdam it’s already past noon, what with travel and time zones. How is this even fair?

Of course, it just puts you closer to cocktail hour, I suppose. As I write this, it is 3:40 pm Budapest time; we are somewhere over Germany. I think. It’s hard to tell:

Although here’s a thing I’d never seen:

That is not a lens flare or reflection: it is a circular rainbow on the cloud.  Later, the shadow of the plane was in the center.  It was cool, and there were some phenomenal cloud formations we flew through which would have caused any CGI director to have an orgasm.

So thus far on my birthday I have seen the inside of two KLM planes, and the corridors of the Schiphol. This is not even close to glamorous.

Do not get me wrong: soon enough this will be delightful, what with mud baths in Budapest and concerts in Vienna, but I hate hate hate hate hate flying. It’s tedious, uncomfortable, and my ears feel like someone has jammed pencils into them. And if I had not snagged analgesic patches for my right buttock from my pain management doctor, this would be the crankiest first world birthday rant ever.

— — — — —

As was foretold in the prophecies, the trip itself is rather phenomenal.   All those Downton Abbey commercials?  Glossy advertising merely.  (I am writing this on Saturday morning.)  The reality is far better.

The ship is spotless and elegant, the staff is warm (imagine a boat full of Chekhovs from Star Trek), and the food is amazing.  The program director, Sorin, is sincerely funny (“After dinner tomorrow night, you may visit the wheelhouse, where the captain will show you the buttons you are not allowed to push,” in that Slavic accent).

The room, of course, is tiny:

That’s basically it.

At dinner, I was surprised by my lovely first wife:

You can’t see it, because I ate it before thinking to get a photo, but just behind the blackberries is a little medallion made of sugar with the Viking logo on it.

After dinner, we strolled up to the sun deck (where you have to be wary as we approach bridges: the Danube is up, which means you may find yourself like an overconfident movie villain in a train-top fight scene if you’re not careful) and got a night time river tour of Budapest, narrated by the ever-entertaining Sorin:

There was a lot more, of course, but how many stunning night-time photos of imperial architecture do you really want to see?  By the time our ship — the Viking Tor — had turned around and come back up river to dock for the night, we were exhausted and went to our room to unpack and collapse.

 

Long-time readers of this blog will remember the Great Cross Country trip from four years ago (!) and the Great Southwestern Woo Exploration from two years ago.  Tonight we shall set off on yet another adventure, this time to my beloved homeland of Hofvonstein.

Actually, it’s a Viking River Cruise—yes, just like on Downton Abbey—from Budapest to Nuremburg, up the Danube River, but most of the journey we will be sailing along the western border of Hofvonstein.  I even made sure that our cabins faced the homeland, although we’re mostly sailing at night and our windows are tiny little slits.  (Not everyone ponies up for the luxurious balconies.)

Sidebar for those who have no clue what I’m talking about: several many years ago, back at Newnan Community Theatre Company, we would do these interactive dinner theatre murder mysteries as fundraisers.  They were a lot of fun and cost us nothing: we would develop a scenario and characters, meet for a couple of rehearsals to improv scenes and evidence, and then away we went. The audience would buy tables for the catered dinner, meeting us during the cocktails round as they arrived, and then after we read them the rules they would choose which of the characters they wanted to follow into all the nooks and crannies of the theatre we were using as the environment. We’d kill someone off in full view of the audience, then have dinner, kick off the last round with another murder, and then wind up with a death so obvious that if you were in the room you knew exactly who did it, how, and why.

Anyway, in 1999 we invented the country of Hofvonstein, whose court had gone to Vienna in 1899 to ring in the new century on New Year’s Eve.  We had so much fun that we began to follow the characters through the next 30+ years, and then went back to 1601 when all the internecine strife began.  Good times.  Count Karl Magnus von Ludwighof (1854-1923) is still one of the best characters I have ever played.

I’ve been there before, actually, back in November of 2007.  Our son was studying in Munich for fall semester, so naturally we had to go see him for Thanksgiving.  While we were there, I decided it would be incredibly stupid to be this close to the homeland and not go, so we hopped a train and a bus and traveled over to Waldkirchen, the capital city of Hofvonstein.

The point here is that I will once again be travel blogging as we eat our way north past Hofvonstein, with the caveat that I’m doing this on my iPad so heaven knows how regular I will be.  The ship has wifi, so I’m not anticipating any problems, and actually this time I’m using the iPad versions of the very software I use here to manipulate images and upload them to the server (Pixelmator and  Transmit, for those who were wondering).  However, I may be so overcome with Heimatnostalgie that I can’t even.

Or hungover.  Whatever.

The usual caveats apply: yes, we have a house sitter, so don’t even think of robbing us blind.