Alright alright, we’re finally getting out of Budapest here. Promise! But we still have a little bit of Budapest to go. We awoke on the ship still moored in good ole’ Budapest. This was our first real day doing ship stuff on a Viking river cruise aboard the Tor and we were pretty excited. Not yet used to the routine we missed my family at breakfast but don’t worry, we would miss them more when we were in separate groups for the bus tour (after this tour we would always be in the same group).

On the Viking cruise every day there is at least one activity already included with the cruise. You could in addition pay more money to do more stuff, but we only wound up doing I think two of the paid extras. The included tour this day was “Panoramic Budapest,” i.e. a bus and walking tour of Budapest. My super amazing wife and I had spent several days already in Budapest, but for most of the cruisers, including the rest of my family, this was going to be most of what they saw of the city.

So off we went with our guide Andresh for a cruise around the city. As a novelty in our particular trip we focused on the Pest side, driving past Heroe’s Square and glancing at Europe’s largest synagogue and various other things all apparently built in 1896, that year being one millennium after Hungary’s founding in 896.

But enough of Pest. We were heading back to Buda castle once again for another look around the castle district. The highlight here was Matthias Church. Given how experienced we were with Buda my super amazing wife and I had already walked past it a lot and even admired the roof but we had mostly ignored it. This was a tour of Europe so it was inevitable we were going to see a lot of churches. The tour director on the cruise even said our ABCs would evolve – starting by admiring “Another Beautiful Church” and ending with hating “Another Bloody Church.” But Matthias – man what a church!

The place was gorgeous. You go inside and the entire church is absolutely covered in painted motifs, each apparently representing the different Magyar tribes that founded Hungary. We had never seen a church like this and it reminded us not so much of any other church as it did the Mezquita-Catedral de Córdoba. The Matthias church was actually a mosque there for a while the Ottomans were in charge and we had wondered if that influenced the decoration but according to Wikipedia not so much; while a mosque the decorations were plastered over. But if you’re in town it is def worth a wander to see what has to be a uniquely visually stunning church.

And with that the tour gave us some time for some souvenir shopping and then the moment came – we were leaving Budapest and off to rendezvous with the ship. The ship had gotten underway while we were touring about so we had to drive up-river some to enable it to pick us up. This rendezvous point was our second church of the day, the Esztergom Basilica (so already here we go with all the churches) but we only admired it from afar. There was lunch onboard and the afternoon and evening were entirely river cruising, which was great. Being such a fan of ships my biggest problem with cruises is that you seem to spend so little time underway, but on this river cruise there was actually a fair amount of cruising time, allowing you to read a book on the sun deck as the European scenery slowly slid past.

The day finished with a very exciting event though: our first lock! At this point my super amazing wife and I had been watching a whole lot of Kris Atomic and so were thinking about canal locks a bunch and were excited to go through one. Clearly though the English canal system and the Danube were two different beasts. This first lock was to get us past the Gabčíkovo Dam and it was actually a quite popular event on board. We arrived in the lock as after-dinner drinks were going on and a good crowd of people ascended up to the sun deck (moon deck at the time) to watch the goings-on.

A few observations. The Viking longboats are very well designed for Danube navigation. While most everyone was crowded around the bow my dad and I had noticed the ship’s bridge and all the controls so we were hanging out back around there. He was bold enough to duck his head in and after the captain returned to his post got the full run-down. The ship has four controllable thruster pods underneath (I’m having trouble fact-checking this) which makes it very maneuverable. Parallel parking is not an issue for these boats.

Where was the captain returning from? The neat auxiliary control stations that must be more convenient for docking or, as we were in this case, navigating a lock. The ship also has autopilot which apparently does a lot of the work, which sounds nice. Meanwhile the boat is also designed to go under very low bridges. To accommodate bridges, the ship’s bridge goes up and down on hydraulic lifts. The deck railings can also be lowered, and to go under the very lowest bridges the ship’s bridge can go all the way down to be flush with the deck, with a hatch in the top for the captain to stick his head through until the very last moment.

But none of that was needed for the lock, which was a pretty staid experience. We went slowly up and when the water was at the right level, the upper gate lowered and away we sailed into the night. As King Matthias (Corvinus) would have said, on to Vienna!