Vacation, just what the traveler needs

I must admit that I feel more comfortable in a hotel bed than my own some times.  For my vacation you’d think it would make sense to do a staycation, but instead I decided to hit up the capitals of Europe.  Even though the weekly travel grind is just that…a grind, it is still an oddly warming feeling.  I took weeks of business travel for leisure travel.  It’s amazing how much of a city you can see when you can actually go to places between 10 am and 6 pm (standard opening hours for most of the museums I saw).  Sure, business travelers get to visit a lot of cities, but we rarely actually SEE them.  I’m trying to yelp to find places to eat, but normally I just find a Cracker Barrel and pretend like I never left the South.

The cities I visited on vacation were Berlin, Prague, and Budapest.  My favorite?  By far Budapest. The Metro was a little confusing until I got my bearings, but it was frequent and reliable.  Budapest was touristy, but not to the point of Prague.  If I want a Starbucks on every corner I’ll just stay home!  I didn’t see a single Starbucks the whole time in Budapest although apparently they exist.  Berlin was too modern for me.  There are plenty of cities in the US built after 1950.

I found it interesting…in Berlin I did a hop on/hop off bus and had a French tour guide, then an American one.  In Prague I did a paid walking tour which was led by a lady who was not from Czech Republic, but I’m unsure where exactly she was from.  In Budapest, on the other hand, all the tour guides on the Free Budapest Walking Tours are native Hungarians.  Most of them were actually from Budapest.  The tours cater to the backpacker type person so I felt a bit old on the tour, but the guides were enthusiastic.