Viking River Cruise - Romantic Danube - Day 2 - Budapest, Visnograd and sailing away

Okay, before I forget I'm going to just tell you what happened yesterday afternoon... you know the part where I thought maybe we took a nap... but I couldn't actually remember what happened? I must have blocked it out because it was traumatic 😉 <insert sarcasm here>. We went on a "tour" which we thought was of Budapest, but ended up being what I like to refer to as "going around the block".

We put on all our spiffy little Viking River Cruise Headsets... tuned to the frequency of the guide and headed out. The first place we stopped was a little parking lot right outside the boat. He was going to help us "get our bearings about the pier". So like little sheep around 50 of us followed him into the parking lot and dutifully listened to him. Then when he turned around to continue on , he realized that the gate to the parking lot had closed. You can't open the gate without a fob. He did not have a fob... we were TRAPPED! We must have just walked in after a car had finished driving in. The hilarious thing was that the fence around the lot was only waist high and was big enough to climb through... but he told us to wait for someone to come open it. Steve didn't wait long to jump over... most of us climbed through shortly after... eventually (I'm talking 20 minutes) someone came and let the stragglers out. I now refer to it as "remember the time we got locked in a cage in Budapest?"

Okay, now on to today. We headed out on our tour after a lovely breakfast. They give you a little card to tell you what bus to get on, you get your little headset ready and off you go. Our tour guide today was terrific! He was full of information about Hungary and seemed really interested in what he was telling us. He pretty much filled us up with information for the 3 or 4 hours we were on the tour. Just a little plug for river cruising... in every port there is at least one tour that is included in your cruise... no extra shore excursion cost.

First we drove through the Pest side of Budapest and he told us all sorts of fascinating things, (which I promptly forgot). It really gave you an understanding of the history of Hungary and put the things we were seeing in perspective. The first place they let us off the bus was at Heroes Square. It is a place with a lot of statues of important people in Hungary's history. He was able to tell us a little bit about each person which was quite interesting.

Heroes Square in Budapest. There is a little statue in between each of those columns that depicts a person who was important in Hungary's History. Steve was pleased to see that King Stephen was the first king of Hungary 😁

Behind Heroes Square we could see this medieval castle looking place. If we weren't on a tour I'm pretty sure we would have wandered over there to find out more!

After this we headed on our bus over to the Buda side of the city. This is more of the exclusive side which has beautiful historic buildings on the hill. We were able to walk through the streets a bit, had a tour inside St. Matthias Church and then admired the view from the Fisherman's Bastion (which is BEAUTIFUL!)

St. Matthias Church from the outside. It was built in a variety of styles, apparently to show the history of what had been on this spot (and destroyed many times).

They gave Steve this fancy little shawl because you must have your shoulders covered in the church.

The incredibly beautiful Fisherman's Bastion, which has views over Pest

View of the parliament in Pest from the Fisherman's Bastion on the Buda side.

After this we headed back to the bus and drove through rural Hungary to the port of Visnograd where we met up with the boat. We soon set sail on our way to Vienna.

Here is our boat the "Viking Atla"

After a nice lunch of Hungarian Goulash (you gotta eat it when you're here!) we spent some time up on the deck admiring the scenery as we sailed down the Danube through Hungary.

We had to at least stay awake until the Muster Drill!

It doesn't matter how old you are... you still want to sumo wrestle with your brother when you have your life jackets on 😉

Then, we had to take a nap, as we've only been sleeping about 3 hours a night still. (Not sure why it is taking so long to adjust to the jet lag.)

When we woke up we realized the boat had docked. Apparently there was an announcement saying why we had docked... but we slept through it!

Unfortunately, there had been some sort of accident up the Danube where 6 barges had crashed into each other. They had closed the river to traffic until they were able to clear the river of debris. This resulted in us making an unscheduled stop in Esztergom, Hungary. We spent a nice evening on the boat enjoying dinner and admiring the scenery.