Vacation

These brochures and tickets represent of the places that we visited while our daughter Molly, visited us in Budapest. She arrived on Friday afternoon. We found her after waiting for her an hour in the wrong place and she about ready to try to call us and find out where we were. We have all experienced those times. There is more than one place to meet incoming flights at the Budapest airport and we were not at the right one. So much for wanting to maximize the time available to us!! But we found her and brought her back to the library with us.

We visited many the tourist sights in Budapest, including the Citadella, where this picture is taken. One interesting point is that we are looking down on the Gellert Hotel and the building that houses the library. The huge crane that is in the picture, is right across the street from our building. This is one of my favorite places in Budapest, because of the great view. It is spectacular! There is a huge monument at the top of this hill that symbolizes freedom.

In Vienna we visited Praterstern

which is a huge amusement park. Unlike Six Flags, admission to the park was free, so we went in and walked around. This park is world famous for it's giant ferris wheel. The seating on the ferris wheel looks like a caboose. The ferris wheel was constructed in the later 1800's and what impressed me about much of the park was the architectural elements. It was obvious that these buildings had been here a while.
We also visited Schonbrunn Palace in Vienna. It was the summer residence of the Hapsburg family, who ruled the Austro-Hungarian Empire. The palace is incredible on the interior but as you can see from this picture, the outdoors were very well manicured. This picture only shows a very small part of the grounds.

Molly visited us for 9 days and it always goes too quickly. We were encouraged by her visit and it is easier for her to know what we are talking about when we mention the market or Mammut Mall or other places that we normally shop or spend time at. We had a lot of fun showing her our favorite ice cream shops, coffee shops and cafes and laughed a lot when we rented bicycles to ride on Margit Island. The bicycles were well used and it looks like more fun than it actually is. We were blessed with nice summer weather while she was here and even though it rained a little in Vienna, it was always nice enough that we could get where we wanted without getting drenched.