After Tallinn and seeing bears in Estonia and a couple busy days in Latvia it is time to change countries again. This time we are flying to Hungary for a couple days to visit relatives and explore the country for a short while before driving to Romania. The flight is short and uneventful and soon we are reaching Hungarian airspace and descend into Budapest.
Here we link with our relatives who ask us if we want to see the nearby airplane museum. We are interested so after a short drive we are at the entrance and in we go. The museum is based on the fleet of airplanes of Malev the former Hungarian national carrier that went bankrupt after the end of communism.
There are also other airplanes and even helicopters here. Some are quite interesting but few of them can be entered unfortunately.
There is even a collection of buses here that were used to ferry people from the terminal to the airplanes. Those actually look still functional and like they could be used at the airport but obviously they aren’t.
We finally enter an airplane but a lot of other people had the same idea which makes it less fun as it is difficult to move in modern airplanes if multiple people are using the aisle.
But if we find an airplane that is more empty it is fun to see how they were different from the modern ones. We explore them as best we can but there is no information about them like name, when they were used or anything.
Luckily our relative is an expert and has a story for almost every airplane including the fighter jet which is quite out of place between the many passenger planes around it.
Near the exit is another one of the buses but you can enter this one and watch the planes take off or land on the nearby airport in real time. It is quite fun to watch for a while but then it is time to leave as we have a dinner to go to.
Before dinner we have to go to the hotel though, it is in the suburbs near a mall, nothing special but good enough for one night.
A bonus for this particular Ibis, especially given the room we received is that we overlook a nearby forest, quite good possibly for birds if we are lucky.
The room is Ibis spartan with quite an interesting art drawn on blackboard. Or was it an actual painting? We are not really sure.
We spend the evening having dinner with a few relatives that live near Budapest. Full and after a long day we then return to the hotel for a good night sleep as tomorrow we plan to drive towards Romania.
While we do not necessarily like the hotel we do like the views from the balcony in the morning. They are quite expansive over a forest and we see quite a few birds while eating breakfast from the provisions. We are taken in especially by the wood pigeons that forage in the garden right below our balcony. And then it is time to leave, we are going east towards Romania stopping in Hortobagy along the way.
