Our actual anniversary isn’t until October 12, but due to our respective work schedules and, to be quite honest, the possibility that the Nationals look like they may be playing postseason baseball during that time, we opted to take our big anniversary trip just a little bit early. For those of you wondering, I was the one who insisted on no travel in October, and Wendy was the one who was not at all happy that the Nationals and their possible playoff schedule would be impacting the dates of travel. She just doesn’t get it, but she loves me enough to humor me, and for that I love her even more. It’s hard to imagine that we’ve been married for nearly 10 full years. I mean, only old people have been married for that long, and we’re not old, right? Okay, maybe we’re a little old.

Wendy’s actually been scoping our various potential destinations for this trip for a while. In the past, we’ve often gone to San Francisco, Napa Valley, and Carmel to celebrate our anniversary. Other years we’ve stayed local or went on a little Eastern Shore excursion. But this year, Wendy wanted to “do it big,” and go somewhere neither of us have ever been before. We’ve been kicking around various ideas like a South African safari, Hawaii, Ireland/Scotland, Fiji, and many other destinations for some time until Wendy saw a deal website that was touting a getaway to Budapest, Vienna, and Prague. Though we weren’t getting the package from the deal website, the various destinations sounded great to us. Neither of us had ever visited Hungary, Austria, or the Czech Republic, but we felt comfortable enough going to this part of the world, and best of all, we were both excited at the prospect of a new adventure. To reinforce our decision, all of our friends who’ve been to any of these destinations told us that not only did they love it, they thought we’d love it too.

After much planning and anticipation, we kicked off the first leg of our trip with a long flight (two flights, actually) that took about 16 hours total to get us from DC to Budapest. We flew through Amsterdam, and I’ve got to be honest, it was tearing me up a little that we weren’t going to be doing just a bit of sightseeing in Amsterdam, even though we were so close. Wendy’s been there before, so she felt no burning desire, but I’ve wanted to go for a while. Instead, we boarded our flight to Budapest and I was able to look at Amsterdam and its cool canals from afar.

Here’s a little tidbit about me, I can’t sleep on flights, and this is a horrible fact on overnight flights to kick off a vacation. It doesn’t matter how tired I am, how long I’ve been awake, or how much I want to sleep, I just can’t sleep unless I’m laying flat with a little room to periodically adjust my position (ahem, I'm just a first class kind of guy who happens to be stuck in coach). Since we’re not ridiculously wealthy and we didn’t have some amazing hookup for miles or upgrades to first class for the flight, there was no significant sleep for me. This meant that, upon our arrival, I was already running on fumes, but I was still very excited to be in a new city and experiencing a new adventure.

The hotel we had booked in Budapest was the St. George’s Hotel within the touristy but sleepy and cool Castle Hill on the Buda side of the city. If you’re not familiar with Budapest, it’s actually two very old cities that sit on either side of the Danube River, Buda (on the west with higher elevation) and Pest (on the east).

The views of the Pest side of the city from Castle Hill were rather spectacular, and were our first overall impression of the city as we ventured out before the sun set.

After settling in to enjoy a relaxing dinner at our hotel and to begin our long awaited anniversary vacation, we were well on our way to discovering and having a great time in a new-to-us old city of the world.