Thursday 22 August – River Cruise (Budapest)

Breakfast commenced at 7:30am. We were up and ready for breakfast just prior to this time. Again the selection of items was excellent.

They made a point the night before that the buses would leave promptly at 8:30am. Ros and I got our tour number tickets (#1). After having breakfast with Carol and Mick we realised that they had number 2. We decided we would swap to be on the same bus. We took the 8:30am departure seriously and headed off. As we were docked against another ship, we had to go up to the sun deck and go across the other ship to exit.

On board the bus we waited for Carol and Mick. Hopefully they hadn’t swapped across to #1! A few minutes later they boarded, but didn’t see us. We did call out to Carol, but she didn’t hear us either. Finally Ros tried to ring Carol. She didn’t answer, but did ring Ros back and then realised we were all on the same bus. We all moved up to the back of the bus where there was more room.

First stop was going to the the Parliament building, with the tour commencing at 9:15am. It was my nephew Lachlan’s birthday so we rang him to say Happy Birthday. It was very noisy because the guide was talking the whole time on the loud speaker in the bus. We arrived just before 9am so had about 15 minutes before our tour started. We decided to ring Lachlan back and sing happy birthday again given it was less noisy, and we had practiced our singing voices.

Our tour commenced sharply at 9:15am, but the tour guide was the Parliament-appointed one. At the same time there was an Italian-speaking group going through. The Parliament was stunning. We walked up a gold staircase of 138 steps at the start of the tour. One of the things I remember bout it all was that they had stained glass windows they took out of the building and put in the basement during the war. Which they built pretend walls in front of the doorways to hide them from invading armies. After the war and all the bombings they put them back in. Therefore the windows were the original 150 year old ones.

Our tour resumed back on the bus. We went through the city centre and saw some of the sights we had seen on the previous tour two years ago. We then went up to a viewing spot on the mountain where you could see across the entire city. It was a great view. As we were leaving, there were lots of buses coming up the hill and all clogged up. We were lucky to get there (and leave) when we did!

On return to the boat we went up the lounge to have a drink and wait for lunch service to start. Lunch again was nice with a great selection – the roast pigs leg with sweet mustard gravy was particularly nice.

Ros had a massage booked in for 2pm and I had one for 3:30pm, so we went back to the room to get ready for that. I went up to the lounge and wrote some blogs and organised photos while Ros had her massage. When I came back to the room Ros had just returned and looked very relaxed indeed.

I went down for my massage. To be honest, it was one of the best I’ve had. The guy had the right pressure and got into the sore parts of my shoulders without too much issue. He did say that he’s had people who want a massage but when they see it’s a guy they decide not to go ahead. Very disappointing for them, they don’t know what they are missing out on. I went back to the room and Ros said are you going to have a nap, I said no I will just lie down for a minute (1 hour later and I woke up).

There was a Captain’s cocktail reception where they introduced a number of the department heads, followed by more information on the upcoming excursions. They did say that for all the people that had been waitlisted on the excursions that were limited, that they were able to accommodate all of them and therefore no wait lists. Good news for those people that wanted to do things but potentially could have missed out.

Dinner tonight was a gala dinner – one where we had to wear a jacket in addition to what we usually had on. That was ok, not too much difference for us – just the jacket. The selection again was excellent and we were well and truly satisfied with the food and drink on offer. Ros was enjoying her “free Kahlua and milk” lol.

Tonight we would be cruising south from Budapest to a town near the border of Hungary and Croatia. We would arrive around 5am – with the possibility that we could be docked against another ship, so make sure those blinds are shut!