Summer 2022: The Danube Caper - Moving Day

August 18, 2022

Budapest is very charming. There are lots of big parks, plenty of tree-lined boulevards and no buildings over 6 stories, except the Parliament, the larger churches and a few castles. It is clean and safe and the people are warm and very hospitable. No one honks there horns there! Most locals speak english, especially those under 40, and that means a great percentage of people speak english because Hungary seems to have a very young population.

The Matild Palace was a great base camp, the staff made Gym and his lovely sidekick feel at home and their room was very comfortable. However, it was time to move on. With the riverboat cruise having been scrubbed just as they had arrived in Europe, it was incumbent on our intrepid duo to see a little more of Europe before returning home. They decided to spend some quality time in Vienna. Situated only 250 kilometers away and with so much to see, it was a no-brainer add-on to the newly improvised itinerary.

Gym liked the Matild so much that he booked a sister hotel in Vienna starting on August 18th. He looked at taking the train to Vienna but then found a car service that would take them door to door with a stopover in Slovakia for a couple of hundred euros. The driver spoke english and provided some local flair to the five-hour trip which included a 2-hour pit stop in Bratislava. Our travelers never had to touch their luggage and it was a great way to see another country in between Budapest and Vienna.

Bratislava was was a fun place to visit. First the driver took our travelers to one of the highest elevations in the city to see the views. It was also where the Red Army chose to build the Slavin War Memorial for those in the Red Army that gave their lives, fighting the Nazis in WW2. Gym followed his dear wife to the top of the memorial in the 35C heat.  There they were rewarded with some great views of the city.

From there they drove down to the very enchanting old town and the driver let the intrepid duo have 90 minutes to explore. After scaling the monument in the heat, Gym suggested the first stop should be a gelato shop. There being no disagreement, they proceeded directly into the nearest gelato emporium and ordered something cold and calorie-dense. Once fueled up, they wandered into old town with no real goals in  mind but sometimes that is the best way to approach things. It turned out that around every corner in this hodgepodge of cobblestone streets, there was some interesting. Whether it was public art, an old church to explore or a shop to tempt the tourist with some unique Slovakian offering it was all delightful. After concluding the walkabout they met the driver at the pre-determined time and were soon on the highway to Austria. As they drove across the border Gym thought that Slovakia required a return visit someday.

The driver proceeded directly to the the new basecamp in Vienna. It seemed we had just crossed the border and we were in the suburbs of of the city. Then almost to the minute of the promised arrival time they reached their destination. The Bristol Hotel on the Ringstrasse in Vienna was their new temporary home. The Bristol was situated well between the Hofburg Palace and Belvedere and across the street from the Vienna Opera House. The location was perfect!

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Summer 2022: The Danube Caper - Short Danube River Cruise

August 17, 2022

Having been foiled by global warming and a low Danube that prompted Uniworld Cruises to cancel their riverboat cruise just days before they were to board, our travellers thought that on their last full day in Budapest, they would book a 2-hour river cruise to check out the river levels themselves. Hop on-Hop Off Tours offered just such a tour and it came with a bus tour around the city. The bus tour was sort of disappointing because it returned our travellers to everywhere they walked to in the previous three days but the boat tour was a fun and really novel way to see the sights. The commentary provided over earpieces was very upbeat and informative and the boat itself was comfortable and spacious.

The boat left from a dock not far from the parliament buildings and traveled upriver to Margaret Island. You could get off there and explore the massive city green space but Gym and his dear companion, chose not to do that because they would have to catch the next boat to continue the journey downriver and that would disrupt their schedule for the rest of they day. So, they stayed onboard and the boat turned around and travelled several kilometres downstream to check out much of the city that our travellers had not seen yet (see the pics for more detail). Apparently boat traffic was light because freight boats were not using the river and there was plenty of room to maneuver. Gym could have driven the tour boat that day.  He had pictures to take though and his dear wife may not have appreciated the captain turning over the wheel. After a while, the boat turned around again and returned to the starting point.

After disembarking, Gym and Mrs. Gym walked to the Budapest Market. Gym was told that this was the place to buy Paprika so he was going to load up. Not knowing what to expect Gym was very impressed with the very clean and well organized multi-level space. There was no litter, no fishy smell and the display cases were beautifully arranged. Gym rushed up to the first Paprika counter that he saw and bought a trunk load of Paprika. Later as they made their way into the interior of the stalls Mrs Gym noticed that Paprika counter were discounting the same same products and Gym was scolded for being a lousy shopper. Live and learn, Gym always says. On the way back to the hotel, Mrs. Gym bought a handmade dress for Audrey, the beloved granddaughter. It was only 18 euros, a "heck of a deal", Mrs. Gym quipped. Later, arriving at the hotel lounge tired and thirsty, our travellers scored a couple of cocktails and celebrated a successful day of touring and shopping.

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Summer 2022: The Danube Caper - Part 4

 On August 15 and 16, 2022, the exploration of Budapest continued in earnest. Over this 48-hour period, our undaunted travelers covered a tremendous amount of territory, exploring deep into Pest as well as crossing the Danube into Buda. There are countless sights on both sides of the river and its best to visit them on foot. 

Gym and his dear wife logged 35,000 steps exploring numerous attractions over the 2 subject days but some of this was due to a miscalculation by Gym. On Monday morning, Gym explained to his fetching bride that visiting Buda Castle and the Fisherman's Bastion would be a short jaunt across the river and up the hill. But his reconnaissance sucked!  He thought they would saunter over to cross the Chain bridge to get there and it was closed  for repairs. This meant they had to go all the way down to the Margaret bridge and come back towards the Fisherman's Bastion. No big deal for Mrs. Gym, the marathoner but our hero didn't eat enough pancakes at breakfast to allow for that error.

The historic Buda Castle Complex lies on the west side of the Danube. It sits atop a high promontory that was a good place to build a fortress. It is a good workout if you climb up there on foot, so you know how hard it would have been to try and attack the fortress when you are out of breath and pooped-out. Gym very highly recommends climbing the stairs though, it is the coolest way to enter the Fisherman's Bastion. The entrance stairway is very scenic. It rises up out of Watertown, where the fishermen used to live and it is one of the most attractive stairways you'll ever see. After humping up those steps you are rewarded with an outstanding view of Pest, especially the old town and the Parliament. You have also entered the Castle District which is right out of a fairytale.

The Castle District with its cobblestone streets and Neo-Romanesque buildings is simply enchanting. At the top, one should scale the ramparts for the best view of the city and then turn around to see the impressive bronze of  St. George and the stately St. Matthias Church. Take a walk around the district and make your way though the narrow alley ways to Buda Castle. Unfortunately, when Gym was visiting, there was lots of restoration work going on and it was hard to get near the castle. And don't go too early if you expect to be able to get a coffee up there, Mrs. Gym needed a caffeine fix and none of the dozen or so cafes was open at 9am.

The next day, our travelers headed in the opposite direction, deep into Pest. They walked down Andrassy Street towards City Park. This tree-lined boulevard is where you'll find all the chi-chi luxury shopping at one end and many of the larger Embassies at the other end. Right after passing the Turkish and Macedonian Embassies you cross over to Hero's Square. Gym and Mrs. Gym were very impressed by the central  monument there. It is a large column with bronzes of the seven mounted Chieftains of the Maygar tribes at its base and Archangel Gabriel at the top.  

Across the street is City Park. Our adventurers walked counter-clockwise around Vajdahunyad Castle and the lake that surrounds it. It is a scenic part of the park with nice mature trees, many bronze statues and a cool drawbridge on the entrance to the castle. It was a long walk to get this far from our hotel and they didn't have time to explore the whole park that includes a zoo and amusement park but that left a more thorough visit for their next trip.

Later on the16th, just before dinner, the Doheny Street Synagogue was visited. The main building is the largest synagogue in Europe. In the garden behind the synagogue are various memorials and graves and a smaller place of worship, used in the winter. The most unique tribute in garden is the Holocaust Tree of Life Memorial that has a leaf for each person killed by the Nazis in WW2.

After experiencing 35C temperatures since they arrived in Hungary, it rained hard as our hungry travelers sat down for pasta just off Doheny Street. Gym's penne alla arrabiata was very disappointing but as he ate it in spite of its mediocrity, he thought how happy the farmers and riverboat cruise companies must be to have the downpour.

The next day, the plan included a boat ride and a visit to the market.

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Summer 2022: The Danube Caper - Part 3

Having overcome the hiatus without any luggage, our travelers were able to begin a thorough exploration  of Budapest. Gym had earmarked a half-dozen venues around town and the touring began in earnest, on August 14, 2022. It was very hot that day and really the whole time our hero and his dear companion were in Budapest. Everyone was wearing light clothing and t-shirts and bottled water was flying off the shelves at the ABC convenience store. It made sense that the Danube was drying up.

Gym wanted to put some steps on that day but they started too late and they only accomplished about 6 km. In 35C heat, they slogged into 'old town' and turned right at Zrinyl Street. This beautiful street is lined with mature trees and cafes and it leads right toward St. Stevens Basilica, In fact, the Basilica is framed by this tree-lined street when you view it from Steven Square four blocks away. 

As an aside, Steven's Square is where the Four Seasons, Gresham Palace is located. Gym and his dear wife walked into the lobby of this hotel to check it out because it was the main set for Melissa McCarthy's movie, 'The Spy', a comedy that both Gym and Mrs. Gym love and  highly recommend.

Yes, St. Steven's is stunning from down by the Danube but it is just as impressive up close. And wow, on the inside it is something else! It is big enough to hold 8500 people and there isn't a pew in the place that you would be unhappy with. Gaze in any direction and you will be dumbstruck. The interior is breathtaking.

After saying a quiet prayer for an ailing friend, Gym and his dear wife left the cool interior of the Basilica and went back outside. It was blazing hot but on the way back to the hotel they thought, 'What the Hell' and got into line for the Budapest Ferris Wheel.  It was fun!

Later that night. our travellers had great steak dinner at BeerSto14. It's a dumb name but it is highly recommended by Gym and TripAdvisor.

Stay tuned!

St. Stephan's Basilica

Mass had just ended 

A beautiful interior with massive dimensions

It was heavily damaged in WW2 and a 20-year
period of restoration brought it up to its
current magnificence in 2003

A very impressive pipe organ

The dome is 96 meters tall.

Mrs. Gym at the top of the Budapest ferris wheel
 at Elizabeth Square

  

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Summer 2022: The Danube Caper cont.

On the top of the Matild Hotel is this cool rooftop bar where Gym and his lovely wife spent their second evening in Budapest. It looks down on the Elisabeth Bridge that spans the Danube River and connects Buda and Pest. A dry martini and a refreshing Aperol spritzer were just the thing to celebrate a partial victory over some nasty setbacks that had unfolded the previous evening. The luggage was still missing but our intrepid travelers had a note from Lufthansa that someone had seen it in Germany and they wanted to provide assurance that the airline had their best people on the job of reuniting baggage with owner. The major victory came with the Riverboat Cruise company. 

 Gym awoke on the morning of the 13th and knew that dealing with Uniworld Cruises was the first order of business. They had pre-paid the entire cost of a 10-day cruise down the river and were worried that they would get stiffed due to some technicality in the contract. An email had been sent to the company's office to please call Gym as soon as possible and shortly thereafter, the call came through. Gym composed himself and put on his best stern telephone voice to begin the conversation. The cruise company tried to palm off an alternative cruise of lesser value as a replacement to the lost itinerary. Gym held firm and went into his whining voice. He explained that they were already in Europe when the cruise had been called off and had incurred tremendous expense to that point in time. Uniworld softened somewhat but still wanted to keep some of the money. To put the nail in the coffin, Gym went into sobbing mode and the cruise company relented. They agreed to reimburse 100% of the prepaid amount. 

The luggage was still an issue though and Gym was resigned to go out and buy some items of clothing because it had been 48 hours. That day Gym and Mrs. Gym went into old town and checked out the Hungarian Parliament building, an impressive and very beautiful structure. On the way back, Gym picked up a 3-pack of socks at Foot Locker. Then the next morning, miracle of miracles happened and Gym and his lovely bride were reunited with their Heys luggage ovver 60 hours since they had been separated from it on the Frankfurt tarmac. Thank God! It was 35C and things were getting a little sticky, a few changes of clothing was imperative. 

With a couple of issues resolved over that first weekend, our travelers decided to extend their stay in Budapest for a couple of extra days and then move up river through Slovakia to Austria. Plans were fleshed out for transportation upriver and a nice place to "camp" in Vienna. Gym started researching things to do to replace the time they would have spent on the cruise. Blood pressure was returning to normal as the new itinerary came together and an altered adventure began to take shape.

More on Budapest in the next post, stay tuned!

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Summer 2022: The Danube Caper

Gym had a wonderful trip planned. He and his lovely wife were going to start with a few days in Budapest, following which they would board a luxury riverboat and float down through Hungary, Croatia, Serbia, Bulgaria and Romania.  They then would have ended with a few days in Bucharest, before flying home. Everything was booked, including some of the ground transportation. This original plan unravelled in a matter of a few hours on August 12, 2022. 

It started smoothly with a routine flight on Air Canada from Calgary to Frankfurt. Our intrepid travelers had made this run many times and had never had a bad experience. But then after landing in Germany, Gym's spidey sense was tingling when the big Air Canada jet, taxied around in a big circle and stopped on the tarmac. They were not unloading at a gate. Gym couldn't  remember that happening in Frankfurt before. They needed a bus to come and take them to the terminal. That is when the bad karma began to play out.

Later, as the bus careened around the underbelly of the various terminals at FRA, it became apparent to Gym that German efficiency and organizational ability had eroded somewhat during the pandemic. Eventually, they dumped everyone off under Terminal A and the two tired travelers made their way past bewildered looking Lufthansa ground staff, to and through customs. Finally, they emerged into the departure level and needed to find a Lufthansa help center because they had no boarding passes for the next flight. When they found one, it could only be described as a bunker full of shell-shocked passengers jostling for a chance to talk to the strained and stressed out employees. Fortunately, our hero and his lovely companion were issued the boarding passes and would eventually board the airbus to Budapest.

That 90-minute ride was the worst flight ever taken by either of our travelers. They were seated in the 32nd and last row of the plane with enormous Danish men who were wedged in so tightly, Gym was worried they would never be able to get out. The diminutive flight attendants were barking out orders to the passengers that couldn't find space in the overhead luggage racks. They instructed everyone to stow their bags under the seats in front of them and sit down. It took forever but as the flight attendants got things under control, Gym reflected on what a great language German was for giving out orders. Finally, the aisles cleared and everyone relaxed a bit, the doors were then closed and the plane started moving. It took a while for the AC to kick in because it was very hot outside and the plane was packed full. Taking it all in from the last row, it was reinforced on Gym and Mrs. Gym why it's better to pay more and sit at the front of the plane. Normally, that is where they would be but they didn't have business class on this flight. They booked through Air Canada and were kind of second class citizens to those that had booked through Lufthansa.

After enduring a very bumpy ride over the Alps, our travelers landed in Budapest as the sun was setting. The long air journey was finally over but that is when the shit really hit the fan. A series of cruel circumstances began to unfold as our travelers watched every other passenger on their flight pick their luggage from the carousel and leave the terminal. Finally, with great consternation, Mrs. Gym resolved to go to the dreaded lost luggage desk. As his dear wife stood filling out the lost luggage form, our hero thought he should notify the hotel driver that was there to pick them up, that they would be late. He pulled out his cell and turned off airplane mode to send a text. That done, he noticed a voicemail had been left during the flight. He quietly read the transcribed voicemail. It was from the cruise operator. It described the bad news that their riverboat cruise had been cancelled because of low water levels in the Danube. Mrs. Gym was in a delicate state of mind and Gym contemplated withholding the news of this additional setback. However, it had to be done, so he amped up the stress hormone levels another notch with the cruise news. With increased heart rates and blood pressure levels, they left the airport in a beautiful Mercedes Maybach owned by the hotel. The the ground transfer to the Matild Palace hotel turned out to be the best part of the past several hours. 

They checked in to a nice suite in the hotel and our hero and his dear bride realized that they had to undertake two colossal  tasks. The first was to get on the blower with the riverboat company and see how much the cruise operator was willing to go, to compensate out travelers for their losses. The second major task would be for Gym to figure out what to do for the ten days that that the cruise was to last. They were so tired though, that they decided to deal with these things in the morning. That night, their two beloved pieces of Heys luggage huddled together in the FRA internment camp for displaced luggage, pining for their owners. The blue Heys contained all of Gym's carefully folded underwear.

Stay tuned!

Next time, Gym books anything but Lufthanza. Maybe Swiss Air?

2022 Spring Fling: Part 2 - The Beach

 

The Beach

 

From Istanbul, on March 21, 2022, our intrepid travellers finally got to go to the beach. Mrs Gym wanted some beach time and that is what she got!

As you might have guessed, our globetrotters had returned to the Maldives. You may recall that in 2019, Gym and his dear wife made their inaugural trip to this fascinating place. They liked it a lot. It is a great place to uplift your body and soul by taking in some negative ions, some vitamin D and the solitude of a desert island punctuated only by the sounds of the surf. The Maldives are very therapeutic.

The thing about the Maldives is that there are scores of islands to check out, and this time our jet-setters visited an entirely new atoll. The Westin resort is situated on Miriandhoo island, on the Baa Atoll, about 80 kilometres from Male International Airport. This trip required a transfer from the Turkish Airlines jet, to a seaplane. Seaplanes are the most common form of inter-island transport. Gym was pleased to see that the seaplanes weren't just any seaplanes, they were Canadian-made Twin Otters, the famous bush plane of the north. However, in Canada's bush country, the Twin Otter pilots always wear shoes. It was a little disconcerting to see the Maldivian pilots flying with bare feet (see below).

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But our dynamic duo enjoyed the Twin Otter ride and soon they were cruising at a couple of thousand feet above sea level to Baa Atoll. The view of the islands from that height was breathtaking.

In no time at all, our travellers splashed down at Miriandhoo. Minutes later they were greeted by Westin staff and were checked in and given a tour of the property. Shortly thereafter, they were led to the beachside bungalow, their home for almost two more weeks. 

The "lobby" of the Westin

looking south

the path to Gym's bungalow

the back door facing the Indian Ocean

Looking towards the ocean we had a screen of 
bushes for privacy punctuated by a narrow footpath to the beach 

Once settled, Gym and his dear companion, relaxed into an easy daily regimen including a daily workout - usually in the early morning, a late breakfast, a dip in the ocean, a nap, mandatory attendance at happy hour and a late dinner. This gruelling schedule was punctuated by some snorkelling by Gym and several beach combing sessions by Mrs. Gym. Mrs. Gym became a proficient beachcomber as time went by. She deftly scoured the high tide line for the most attractive crustacean mobile homes, often beating poor homeless hermit crabs to the most sought-after abodes (no crabs were hurt in the making of this vacation).  

The coolest part of the stay for Gym, was a half-day trip to a good snorkelling reef, off of an adjacent island. On the way over, the dive-boat passed over a giant pod of bottlenose dolphins. There were hundreds of them feeding on a shoal of smaller fish right below the boat. After a bit of sight-seeing, the snorkelers got into the water and struck a coarse along the drop-off for about 500 metres or so.  Gym wanted to make an underwater film and had purchased a clear iPhone bag for just such a purpose. In the process though, he lagged the group and he needed to abandon the project so he could catch up. Gym proved to himself that he ain't no Jacques Cousteau.

Two weeks flew by very quickly and it was soon time for Mrs. Gym to expertly pack the bags and prepare for the journey home. The 3-leg, 24-hour return journey went without a hitch.

The main pool at night. Happy hour was on the
second floor.

Fresh seafood at the Japanese specialty restaurant

The last evening

Happy Hour looked like this.

A failed snorkelling film

The Twin Otter exit from Paradise Island