Tourists

The view out my hotel room window.

After a full 8 hours of sleep and a some showers, today we're going to play tourists. No ballooning, but if you suffer from that ailment you definitely need to be following what's happening elsewhere in Europe.

We'll hop into our shiny Ford S-MAX and drive the 2½ hours back to Budapest.  The train would cost the US equivalent of $50 per person round-trip, so with five of us it will be much cheaper to drive.  The speed limit is 130kph on the highways, which works out to about 81mph.  However we're not interested in getting pulled over (with foreign licenses and non-standard "rental" cars).  It's an very rural drive, as once you leave Debrecen you don't pass through any cities the entire way.  And although there are some 2000'-3000' hills in the distance, the highway itself runs through land that's completely flat - Rantoul flat, for those in ballooning.  In Hungary you drive on the same side of the road and the same side of the vehicle as in the US, so no problems there.  You just have to get used to the different signs.  And our GPS navigators (Garmin Nuvi's) work awesome once the European map cards were installed.  They drove us right to the front door of the hotel.

And we've finally got the hang of the local currency.  Any time I travel internationally I like to come up with a quick way to figure out how expensive something is relative to US currency.  For example, Austria uses the Euro, so in 2008 we multiplied the prices we saw by 1.5 ( €2 = $3 USD).  I don't remember exactly what we did in Japan in 2006. We're not looking for precision, just something to figure out whether you're buying a $2 bottle of water or a $10 bottle of liquid diamonds.  Here the unit of currency is the Hungarian Forint (abbreviated HUF), and the rough conversion formula is to divide by 2, then move the decimal 2 spots left.  So for example, if something costs 300 HUF, that's $1.50 USD.  In general the exchange rate is much more favorable than it was in 2008, so hopefully no more $6 Big Macs and $7.50 gallons of gas.

So here's a very interesting story:  Right after we left Belgium yesterday the country's air traffic controllers walked out - a surprise strike.  All flight operations within the country were suspended - nothing coming or going.  The good news is that by 10:00pm it looked like the issue had been resolved and things should be getting back to normal.  I have no idea what caused the whole thing, and right now it looks like Larry's flights (the same ones we took, just two days later) should be fine.  It's possible other Americans coming over had their itineraries disrupted, but in the end it should all work out fine.

With the absence of Verizon 3G service in Europe I probably be able to update this while we're away from the hotel.  If we come across a free WiFi hotspot in Budapest I may be able to use my phone to post a photo and a little text, but another major update won't happen until we get back (probably no earlier than 2:00pm Michigan time).  However, in the meantime you should click here to watch this video from Budapest, as I can only hope to find something that cool to share.  See it all the way through, it doesn't get really good until about 90 seconds in.