Kicking off 2006 in Budapest! - Part 1 - Getting There is Half the Fun

It wasn't our original plan to be in Budapest for NYE. We were planning on taking a tour bus to Vienna, but since the travel company couldn't sell enough tickets to fill up the bus, we had to take some last minute action.

We know this woman, Nicole who organizes tours as a business. She's not part of a travel agency, she just happens to have a friend who is an Italian bus driver. They do a trip about every month - all over Europe. We had taken a few trips with her before, and they usually turn out to be an adventure. You'll always get to your destination but there might be a few obstacles on the way. So she has this trip to Budapest planned for NYE and there were still some seats available, so we call her up and sign up for the trip.

So here's where it gets confusing - since we ended up signing up at the last minute, and we weren't even returning from Florence until the day before - Susan and I weren't able to get on the bus before it left. Nicole's plan was to put Susan and I on a train to Vienna where we'd meet up with the rest of the group and go the rest of the way on the bus. That sounded good to us, except that didn't work because apparently almost all of Italy decided they wanted to go to Eastern Europe to celebrate NYE! So all the trains were booked up. Now you have to understand that we are finding out this information piece by piece as we travel from Florence back to Venice, and we didn't even know if we were really gonna make it on this trip. So when we get back home from Florence we talk to Nicole and find out that the rest of the group is already in Budapest.

The solution Nicole proposed went something like this- "This blonde girl driving a gray mini-van will pick you guys up in the morning at 6:30am and drive you to Vienna. She'll drop you off at a rest station on the highway, and Manuel (the Italian bus driver) will pick you up there in a rental car and bring you down to Budapest."

Sounds about right for a Nicole trip!

Yeah we had second thoughts, but hey, why not?

As it turned out, there was another couple in the same boat as us. So there were four of us plus the driver. The van ride to Vienna was mostly uneventful - aside from the blonde driver bitching about being given bad directions, the blizzard in the Austrian Alps, and not being able to find the right rest station. Miraculously, Manuel found the rest station where we were and we go outside to put our bags in the rental car. Parked next to the mini-van was a tiny little Fiat that couldn't possibly be the rental we were supposed to get in. We even joked how funny it would be if that was the car for 5 people to take the 4 hour drive from Vienna to Budapest. Man that would suck - so where's our car?

It was the Fiat.

Seriously?

Somehow we got all our luggage into the "trunk". I think my socks and T-shirt drawer from Boot Camp had more room. We start on our way to Budapest and it should be smooth sailing from here.

Not so much...

After about two hours of clear highways, we saw it -- The line of red brake lights up ahead stretching as far as we could see. By now its about 8pm, dark, and its well below freezing. Luckily there was no more new snow falling to add to the 6 -8 inches that was already on the ground. It turns out that there was like an 18 car pile up on the highway earlier in the day and about 10km of highway was completely closed in both directions. So we sit in traffic for at least 2 1/2 hours. We end up driving thru this little Hungarian town and trying our best to find our way back to our path.

Susan and I speak a little Italian, Manuel speaks NO English, and none of us speak ANY Hungarian. And street signs in Hungary are about as helpful as the ones in Italy. Luckily we found some cops that could comprehend "Budapest????" and interpreted the confused look on our faces as a request for directions.

We finally made it to our hotel in Budapest right around midnight on the night of the Dec 30. Nothing beats a good nights sleep after spending 12 hours driving across central Europe.

To be continued...