budapest with the besties

Two weeks before my dad’s visit, Jen and Shanelle came for a week-long stay.

We hit all the main attractions in Prague, but then we took off for Budapest for the weekend!

I wish I could express to you how obsessed we were with our hostel. Maybe it was because we had just gotten of an 8-hour train ride, but we were in love with this place from the moment we stepped into it, and we weren’t shy about letting the owner know. She probably they she was never going to get rid of us.

We had an amazing time in Budapest – great sights, great food, blah blah blah. The real story from this trip was our journey home.

Let’s back up. About three weeks before our trip I got an email from the bus agency I had purchased our return bus tickets from. The email said something about the 4 pm bus from Budapest to Prague being canceled on September 18th. I thought, ‘Okay, no problem.’ Because our tickets were for 4 pm on September 30th. I deleted the email and forgot about it. Cut to September 30th, 3:50 pm. The three of us were racing to get to the bus station before 4. There was a scare on the metro when Shanelle and I realized that we had packed our passports in our luggage and didn’t have them handy for what I knew would be a mad dash to the bus after we got out at the metro station. Thankfully, we retrieved our passports in time, got off the metro and took off for the bus. We emerged from the metro station into a mass crowd of soccer fans. There were people everywhere, and I was frantically trying to spot the bus we were trying to catch. I didn’t see it anywhere, so I asked a police officer who helping to close off a section from the soccer fans. His only words to me were “closed”. I had a sudden flash of the email from three weeks ago.

Long story short – the email that I received had been poorly translated from Hungarian to English from the bus agency and what they meant to say was that the 4pm bus was canceled for everyday after September 18th… We were frantically trying to catch a bus that was cancelled three weeks ago. Thankfully, the girls didn’t try to kill me and we took some time to get our wits about us before heading to the train station to make a last minute booking for the next train to Prague. It was 4 hours later, but we were too late to be able to request seats. Once we got on the train, we managed to each have a seat for about half of the 8 hour trip, but from 1 am to 5 am I was standing in the tiny hallway with Shanelle sprawled out over her luggage next to me and Jen squished in a seat with strangers in the cabin behind us. The whole time I kept thinking about how the day had started – we spent the morning and early afternoon at a spa, relaxing in the thermal spring water and getting massages. Now my back was aching from standing for hours and there was a man snoring 10 inches away from me, who I finally got to stop snoring by “accidentally” hitting him with my purse.

The girls didn’t hold the disastrous trip back to Prague against me, and I hope that we will have many more travel adventures to come. But I think someone else will be double checking our reservations in the future.

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