After breakfast, we boarded the busses early in the morning and set off for Budapest.  Beautiful rolling countryside with Bavarian style homes and barns and lots of wind generators. We arrived in Budapest about 3 ½ hours later and drove past the Freedom (sic) Monument erected after the Soviets liberated Budapest from the Nazis. We arrived at the Viking Idun, our hotel for the night, and had to descend to the floating pier via a 45-degree sloping gangplank.  The river is at record low levels now, 51 cm at the official measuring station. For those of you who are metrically challenged, that is 19 inches deep. Central and Eastern Europe need rain.

Freedom Monument

After lunch we trudged up the gangway and boarded the busses for a quick tour of Budapest.  All of the optional tours had been cancelled due to our late arrival, if we would have been able to come by river we would have arrived at 6 AM.  We drove around the Pest side, passing the main market, the Great Synagogue, Heroes Square, the zoo, the Szechenyi Baths.

Finally we crossed the Elizabeth Bridge to the Buda side of the river where we had a chance to get out of the bus and wander around Castle Hill, into St. Matthias Church and to see the amazing view from Fishermen’s Bastion.

Then a long bus ride back to the ship, complicated by the fact that they were shooting an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie exactly where we were supposed to turn, necessitating a 30 minute detour.  Finally back, we walked up the pier to the Shoes on the Danube Memorial, hundreds of bronzed shoes glued to the pier, commemorating the hundreds of Jews and other Hungarians who were forced to remove their shoes before being mowed down by machine guns and dropping into the Danube.

After dinner, we went up to the Sun Deck to look at the city at night.