Budapest was splendid!! :o)

Sometimes I feel like I need to pull out the good ole thesaurus to look up other acronyms for the word "awesome" as I try and describe all these amazing places we are visiting!  I don't think splendid quite covers how much we enjoyed this lovely city, but you get the idea :o)

It was pretty much a whirlwind trip to Budapest. We hadn't planned to go there until Ryan Airlines offered us seats for 2.15 per person (that's right 2 euros and 15 cents!!!)...and we actually over paid as they went down to 1 euro the next week. So we agreed to their terrible timeframes (leaving at 6 PM Wednesday night and returning home at 6 AM Saturday morning) and hopped on our not so favorite airline once again.  We decided to splurge a little on this trip too and stayed at the Iberostar Grand Hotel and it was so worth it!  The location was great and the hotel was so nice!!

One thing I knew we wanted to do while there was visit one of their well known thermal baths.  So first thing Thursday morning we were off to go swimming.  We decided on the Szecheny baths as it's one of the biggest and most well known.

It was so much fun with the whirlpool in the middle and the heated water.  It was a grey morning, but the temperature was just right to enjoy the warm waters. After swimming we headed back to the hotel to refresh and nap before heading out for dinner.  For dinner we found a real treat...filet mignon!  It was delicious...much better than most of the steaks you find in Europe. It was definitely a fun filled first day in this splendid city :o)

The next morning after some pastries...we were headed out on our own walking tour to see the sites :o)

 I loved the beautifully colorful tile roofs!

  We saw three brides on our trip...so of course I just had to steal some shots...

 The Parliament building was quite stunning...especially from across the river!

Another beautiful bride...about to go in to her wedding at the St. Stephen's Basilica. We didn't get any good shots inside the church because as you can see, more important things were happening there. 

So our funny story from the trip...there were these fountains outside our hotel....it was a rectangle of fountains and we learned when we walked out there that they were motion censored...so if you walked up to them they would turn off, so you could walk in to the middle of them. At first Jacob and Autumn went in and she was having fun trying to get them to "turn off"...

And then...she decided it would be fun to stick her head in the fountains!!  By the end she was running around the entire inside touching all the fountains as she went!!  She even had a crowd watching and laughing at the crazy wet little girl playing in the fountains :o)

Needless to say, she was pretty soaked by the time we dragged her away.  So wet in fact, her shoes are still drying as I write this!  Luckily it was right next to our hotel so we got her inside and dried off and into some warm dry clothes quickly because it was a bit chilly out.  I'm so surprised she even did it...whenever we went to play in the fountains here I had to coerce her to even touch them let alone stick her head in them...ha!  But I'm glad she was feeling brave, because it was so darn cute!

After we were dry and warm, we headed out for a quick night walk for one last view of Budapest. It was such a nice, clean, welcoming city and I would go back in a heartbeat...maybe Ryan airlines will have some more cheap flights and we'll get to spend some more time in splendid Budapest :o)

Click here to view the full Budapest album.