And today was the sad travel home day. Everything went smoothly – which for Ryanair is no small feat! We are exhasted but fulfilled and now are home with our adorable puppy who had a lovely time with Sally-the-dogsitter. A few parting thoughts:
- No more July travel. Climate change has made it impossible for cold weather peeps like us to enjoy going even slightly south. And there are too many people. And everything is underconstruction. We’ve had lots of reasons for choosing this time of year in the past but they are now trumped by heat, horrible humans, and scaffolding.
- A fortnight is just a tad too long. We went a bit out of our comfort zone this time. Our usual trip is about 10 days: 3 place, 3 days each. This seems to be enough to be settled but not enough to be bored (travel ADD is real). We tried 4 places with 3 or 4 days each this time and were really ready to go home a day earlier than we did.
- We like smaller cities. Vienna and Budapest were lovely and each had it’s charms but they also came with big city problems: homelessness, petty crime, etc. We really loved both Prague and Bratislava which probably have similar issues but we didn’t encounter them.
- Slovakians weren’t interested in the Olympics. During our entire time in Bratislava we did not see a single Olympic event broadcast. Not on local TV or in bars or restaurants. Strange.
- Vienna trusts people more than Budapest. Both public transport systems are honour based: there are no gates or scanners or turnstiles to access the metro, busses, or trams. But in Vienna we NEVER saw a single ticket inspector. Not one. In Budapest, we were asked for our tickets at least 50% of the time.
- There is a lot still to explore. This was a city-based trip and we got a tast for different places and cultures and learned 3 new ways to say thank you! But at some point we’ll need to go outside our comfort zone and visit places that don’t really cater to tourists. Which means they won’t speak English as much. Which means we need to get off our duffs and learn other languages. But not Hungarian. I don’t know how anyone learns Hungarian as a second language. 🙂
Final data for the trip:
- Kilometers driven: 2057
- Steps taken: 271,961 or about 119 miles (!)
- Wines tasted: 3 dozen-ish
- Days enjoyed: nearly all of them
- Days until our next adventure: 203
And the only picture that would do for this post:
The Cannon Family's travel blog 