Well, we certainly enjoyed Budapest, but the chief reason may not have a lot to do with Budapest itself. We LOVED going touring on a Segway! What a great invention. In case you missed it, a Segway is a two-wheeled, battery-powered, self-propelled vehicle with no brakes and no steering wheel. Sounds dangerous? Not at all. To go forward, you simply lean forward. To stop or go back, lean back. To turn, there is a little dial on the left handle which turns you on a dime. Now it sounds impossible? Trust me, this is great. This is the coolest vehicle around. In fact, we were so cool, everybody stopped and stared at us as we wheeled through Budapest. Highly recommended. 

The tour we used was through City Segway Tours. The first part of the tour is spent training on the operation of the Segway, and the staff was helpful and patient with us. The training takes about 30 minutes but we all passed with no problem, even the part about jumping small curbs. Our tour guide, Martin, was great; he gave us both the highlights and the inside scoop, and answered every question we had. We cruised along the Danube, viewed Gellert Hill and Castle Hill from the Pest side, saw the Parliament building, and rode past St. Stephen’s Church. The weather for us was fairly cold (maybe 40 degrees F) but even then, no problem. We cannot overstate it, we had a BLAST on the Segway tour. Highly recommended. 

Actually we had fun with everything in Budapest. We stayed at the Hilton Hotel on Castle Hill which is right next door to the beautiful St. Matthias Church. We ate one evening at Cafe Pierrott, which is about 400 meters from the hotel, and had a wonderful haute cuisine dinner with Hungarian touches and some nice Hungarian wine. We ate another evening at the Pest Buda restaurant which was also quite tasty. Both are recommended, as is the Hilton Hotel. 

Two other things which might not make the guidebooks but which certainly made our day. One is the Hungarian Wine Museum, which lets you sample all the wine you can drink in 2 hours from over 20 choices for only $US 20. As one guidebook said, you can either approach this as an oenophile and learn a lot about different Hungarian wines, or you can get completely sloshed. We chose the former but started to approach the latter as time wore on. Recommended for wine drinkers of any type. 

The other non-guidebook stop again involved wine (must be a theme here). The Hilton Hotel is built within the actual ruins of a 12th century monastery which was abandoned in the early 16th century. One of the parts of the monastery that is still preserved is the wine cellar, which is way underneath the hotel. Follow the signs for the Faust Wine Cellar. Keep going and you’ll eventually find the wine cellar with a helpful (if lonely) server who will be happy to serve you a nice glass of wine for a pretty decent price. The cellar, carved right out of a limestone cave, feels like a trip back to 12th century. If you stay at the Hilton, avoid the smoky bar and take a trip into history. 

Next stop, Prague.