A pre-war apartment with 20-foot ceilings, 10-foot windows, 3 bedrooms, and a full kitchen. Long, exploratory walks through the city. Afternoon naps. Evening beer gardens. Renting a car to drive to the town of Eger and spend the afternoon wine-cellar hopping in the “Valley of the Beautiful Women,” trying to discover the best maker of Egri Bikaver. Seriously thinking about, but as of yet, never actually going to, one of the many thermal baths. Eating. Hanging out with friends from the states. What a way to end our trip.
Tomorrow’s “goals” are to find a way to pack the folding bikes for the flight back and to actually make it to the Gellert Baths.
In Esztergom, we stayed at a place called the Ria Penzio where we had a nice room, but an ass of an innkeeper (is that even a term that’s used anymore?). He told us at 9:30am that we had to check out by 10. He overcharged is by at least 10 bucks, then turned into a huffy little kid when we tried to argue. He had himself a pretty nice system of roping people in and overcharging them - he pretended that he didn’t speak English very well, told us that a room was 55 euros and that we could pay in Hungarian forints the next morning, rushed us from the room, gave us 1000 fewer forints in change than we expected, then when we questioned him, he marched us to the room, where the official posted price was 62 Euros. It was a pretty crappy introduction to Hungary. Budapest has made up for it.
From Esztergom, it was not possible to ride along the Danube to Budapest. It seems that all of the package trips along the Danube trail to Budapest require a ferry for the last day. So, we had to buy a road map, and we ended the biking part of our trip with yet another hilly day - 15 or 20 kilometers up before descending into Budapest. We’ve only been on the bikes one time since.
Computer time is up and so is my motivation to write. Pictures from the last week or so of the trip will be on Flickr shortly after we get home. We fly out at 6am on the 12th.
K and M
1 response so far ↓
1 Sara // Aug 10, 2008 at 7:13 am
I’m jealous - any time we are in Budapest we are held hostage by well-meaning relatives. We haven’t ever really gotten to explore the city. I’m not surprised by your experience with the “inkeeper” - we had a bellhop volunteer the exchange rate to us after bringing our bags to our room, which made us feel bad because our tip seemed really meager after that. But then we found out shortly afterwards that he inflated the exchange rate by 1000 - our tip was perfectly adequate and he would have taken us for A LOT OF MONEY!! Whew! Glad we had some locals guiding us through it!
Enjoy your last few days!
Sara
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