April weekend in Budapest

12 04 2011

We spent the second weekend in April in Budapest and although it was not planned to be filled with finding caches it was a pleasant diversion to find a few on our walks around what is a rather beautiful city. Usually at this time of year we still have snow lying on the ground in Gävle and it’s good to get away for a few days to some spot in Europe where it is expected that spring will have arrived. Our choice of Budapest was a combination of convenient cheap flights with Norwegian and cheap yet good quality hotels.

View from Gellert Hill. Buda on the left and Pest on the right.

Even though I have visited Budapest before, in 1997, 2003 and 2007 those were business trips and I still had a lot to see with tourist eyes and this was definitely done on this visit. We chose to stay in a good hotel on the Buda side and walk to the sights as it was such wonderful weather. Every day was around 20C and the trees were all in bloom so it was invigorating.

During our three days in Budapest we covered quite a fair amount of the central parts of the city but only chose to find a handful of caches. There were a few caches that we walked right by due to the large amount of muggles and as there was some EU summit meeting being held the central streets were crawling with police as well. At least the caches we found were such that I could add Hungary as the 23rd country that I have found caches in.

Before we went I downloaded a PQ for central Budapest and found that Mapsource was an inadequate map for me to use. Some internet searching brought me to the OpenMaps Project site. The site has great maps for most of Eastern Europe. My personal preference would be for slightly less colourful maps but they are non the less extremely detailed and accurate.