Budapest: the last (part) day

Packing up to go home is never much fun, especially when there are a couple of long boring flights to look forward to. Our flight was scheduled for 4pm, and we had a taxi booked for 1pm to get us to the airport. We'd hoped at least for a late checkout, but the best the hotel could give us was 11am rather than the official 10am checkout. Evidently they are fully booked.
We utilised our remaining time as best we could. After breakfast we took the ten minute walk to the beautiful Margaret Island. With calm clear weather and the autumn colours starting to appear it was a great way to remember it. At that time on a weekday morning the place is almost deserted, so we thoroughly enjoyed the relaxing hour or so before we had to head back and face the reality of packing.
We had an anxious few minutes at checkout when the hotel receptionist couldn't find our passports which we had left with them for safe-keeping. She was worried, and we were even more so. Maybe we'd be extending our Budapest stay after all? Eventually she made a phone call to her colleague, the passports were found and order was restored.

To all our friends and family who have been following our blog, thank you for your interest and for your comments. Way back, when we started travelling, we would keep a travel diary. Generally Mary would take the details down in shorthand and then, when we got home, we'd transcribe the notes and print them off so that we had a record of what we had seen and done on our trip.
For the past three major overseas trips we have done travel blogs instead. Primarily it was for our own benefit and for the benefit of our daughters so that they could see how much fun we were having while spending their inheritance. We then found that more and more of our family, friends and acquaintances were also taking an interest in what we were up to,which gave us an added incentive to keep the blogs going and to try and make them interesting.
With the first of our three blogs, we were able to get it printed as a book, which is a great souvenir of that particular trip. We often re-read it and re-live the happy experiences.
Once we get home and do some final editing on the computer we will do the same with this blog.
What of our second blog then , our trip to Hungary, Israel, Jordan and France in 2017? That is a work in progress but will definitely be completed and printed in book form some day soon. As many of our friends know, Brian made a huge mistake with the camera settings before we left for overseas and as a result the many photos from that trip were all taken at a very low resolution, something we discovered only after we'd got back home. That has acted as a big demotivator, but that blog definitely will get completed.
This latest blog has presented its challenges also. Having our backpack stolen in Barcelona was devastating. Not only did we lose nearly all the photos we'd taken up to that time in Spain but we also lost our iPad and keyboard with which we were writing the blog. Fortunately we still had our passports, phone and one functioning credit card. Without them it would have been a total catastrophe. It has meant though that the bulk of this blog has been tapped out laboriously on a mobile phone screen, which isn't all that easy.
Nevertheless, here we are at the end of our blog and the end of our trip.
We made it!Read more