Saturday, June 10 – Budapest

Stasa and his wife, Georgina, took us on a short walking tour of downtown Novi Sad, followed by a trip to the Museum of Vojvodina. The museum was quite impressive. Our English tour lasted about 1.5 hours even at a hurried pace and we could easily have spent longer. From there we went to the Petrovaradin Fortress on the other side of the river. We had an excellent view of the city, but it started to rain and we did not tour much of the fortress itself. Stasa led us to the highway and we set off for Budapest.

The light rain at the fortress developed into steady moderate to heavy rain as we traveled north until the Hungarian border where it started to clear. Hopefully, this is a portent of things to come.

We were settled into the hotel before 6 when we were expecting to meet up with Laszlo Rudolf. Unfortunately, Laszlo was unable to come, but Beth Long, his research partner from San Diego who now lives in Budapest, met us. She also brought along her young cousin, Tomas, an Electrical Engineer working on his Doctorate who is also a keen genealogist. They suggested a short subway ride to a Hungarian restaurant in the heart of downtown. We had a very entertaining evening of good (but too much again) food, wine, live music from a violin and accordion combo, and interesting discussion. When we finally left about 9:30, we stepped into some light rain. So much for our good portent.

Mary Ann, Daryle, and Marge stayed behind to explore downtown with Beth and Tomas while the rest of us headed back to the hotel. When we got off at the station, we suddenly realized that we had followed Beth without paying much attention to where we were going. We asked an old fellow for directions. He seemed to know where he was going, so Carol, Sue, and I went along. The others weren’t as confident and stayed behind to get better directions. That turned out to be a good choice, as our guide, as sure as he sounded, was taking us in exactly the opposite direction. When we were finally able to get away from him, we headed back to the station, got our bearings from a map on the wall, and caught up to the others at the hotel.