Danube 2025

 Bonus Edition: First-World Travel Adventures! The day started off innocently enough with breakfast at our hotel in Amsterdam. It was one of the smallest breakfast buffets I've seen in a European hotel. Although there was no shortage of wine. We flew from Budapest to Amsterdam. The Amsterdam airport is huge. And we always fly through large international airports. And like most international airports, no need to let a captive audience walk by. Green. And family-friendly. Our flight from Amsterdam to JFK was delayed, but we had plenty of time in JFK to clear customs and make our connecting flight home. We hadn't gotten off the jumbo jet when they canceled our flight home. We've driven from JFK and EWK home before (about 4 hours) when the layovers were unreasonably long and/or connecting flights canceled. But at 10:00pm, there were no rental cars available for a one-way rental. Delta offered to rebook us on the same flight on Monday, but we didn't feel like spending the da...

 Today we got off the boat. Sorting everyone was complicated task, so things were done by color. All the VBTers had orange luggage tags even though we already had luggage tags. The orange tagged bags went to one pile on shore where they got loaded onto our bus. All the other colors got off the boat at other times, and who knows where they went from there. There was no exercise class and there was time to kill after breakfast. We boarded the same coach with the same driver for a three-hour bus tour of Budapest. Our first stop was a fort on a hill in Buda. Here we are climbing the hill. That's Buda on the left of the Danube and Pest (pronounced "pesh") on the right. And Walter's hat. These Bolt scooters got used a lot. Our next stop was a plaza that I didn't find interesting. There were a lot of statues of past leaders and for me, the take-away, was the Hungary has a tumultuous past, they generally picked the wrong side during wars, and they lost a lot of territory ...

We woke up in Budapest. We were able to get in the exercise class before breakfast. Here is what it looked like.  Here is proof that we did it and I didn't just go up and take a picture of the setup. Here is Vicky, the Wellness Coach, doing stretches we could only approximate. Here's the room with the pool cover removed. The water was bathtub warm. I thought it might feel good to soak in there, but the only other time I went up there it was full of tourists!  The gym wasn't really an option either. Our first group activity was a walking tour. I was going to skip it to save my knees for the ride later but all the body parts felt intact. On one of our previous city walks, I asked the tour guide about social services and the countries we were in had much more extensive safety nets than we have in the US. So it was always a little surprising to see pan handlers. It was also interesting to see pan handlers in these countries assuming this position. I don't know what to say a...

 We arrived in Brativslata, Slovakia overnight. The sight outside our window was that of a blocky, Soviet-style building and a lot of concrete instead of green. Beerdock? After our exercise class, we had a short walking tour. The tour was offered by the ship company, not by VBT, so a large crowd assembled on shore. We split into at least four groups and our group was joined by non-VBTers. This is what it looked like in each direction. Natalia wanted us to have a specific guide. We got her, and she was hilarious but I don't seem to have a picture of her. I was pretty done with palaces and government buildings, so I don't have many pictures of those. What struck me were the monuments. I'm not an art history major, but I'd describe the style as communist-era ugly. Jewish Quarter. Even the chain surrounding the monument doesn't say "graceful". After the tour, we got on our bikes. I guess I was getting tired of taking pictures, because this is the only picture ...