You're welcome, Anne-Lise. Maybe your stay at the Grand Hotel was a good decision. I've notified my friend by e-mail, that's all I can do at the moment.

Good Morning Base Campers!
Monday January 15 is
Hungary day
I shall probably make a headstart. Somebody has to do it, and we don’t know who else will do that.
Knowing, I shall not walk alone, TLD, is encouraging
I look forward to ringing your alarm clock
I’m 9 hours ahead of you, you know …
Important message:
Any cruncher is more than welcome regardless of sex, race, and number of 'devices'.
It would be a great help if you would be so kind as to check in at the Hotel Géllert frontdesk,
the reason being that it will be far easier to find your name when it gets badge time.
Hungary has 956 all time members - 876 current.
That's a lot of names to sift through to find you.
It can be done, but the receptionist would rather be talking ....
You will have the opportunity to register later for your badge if you forgot to check in,
so we can put your name in the Base Camp Hall of Fame .
Hungary, we’re on our way to Liszt Ferenc Nemzetközi, a very civilized place
- that’s the Franz Liszt Airport at Budapest for those of you Base Campers
who haven’t brushed up on your Hungarian;
the Hungarians switch surname and family name and we call Ferenc 'Franz'

Good Morning Base Campers!
I took the early morning flight to Liszt Ferenc airport in Budapest in order to arrange for our accomodation at the classic
Hotel Gellért with all it’s art deco charm.
We shall of course have silk sheets as we had in adriverhoef's Grand Hotel. It will be possible to pitch your tents at the nearby Gellért Mountain if you prefer, but as it is fairly steep you may want to make adjustments to get a level place for your sleeping bag.
- and the winter weather may be harsh, so please dress accordingly. We don't want you to catch a cold or what is worser.
So far TLD and mike047 have made firm promises to participate for various periods of time arriving from SeriousCrunchers in Texas.
Aurum420 a fairly new cruncher from the Great Basin has expressend an interest in helping us, so we may be four already.
We have room for many more. Hotel Gellért is a big place, and so is the Gellért Mountain, so, don’t hold back for lack of space.
Remember: just one single WU will earn you the Hungary badge

Fact sheet
Destination: Hungary
Time frame: January 15 – January 25, 2018, with the peak date of January 20 where it would be fun if as many Base Campers as possible would be present at Hungary so we can try to make a SPIKE - a new Base Camp feature to be tested for the first time here
Purpose: To visit Hungary – the team and the country; a Visegrad country (for yourselves to find out)
Check-in: Please let the front desk know when you arrive, so we can sign you up for a badge
Communication: Hopefully we shall get in touch with some team Hungary team members in their team thread. If you know Hungarian, you’re all set. Otherwise Google Translate
will be your savior
- or it may lead to war ....
Badge:

Trek music: Let’s settle for ’An der schönen blauen Donau’
- branjo and I waltz it so well
even as it’s an Austrian composer, but the Danube runs through Hungary, and once Hungary and Austria were one.
The Habsburg Monachy for those interested in history.
Base Camp looks forward to seeing you in Hungary
And some really good news: Saphir12-Nathalie is back from her second Swedish Sony Hospital hospitalization
- beware, I can crunch as well as talk now!

mike047 welcome to Base Camp's Hungary trek.
In true Base Camp fashion you made a head start arriving yesterday. You also made a spike already
This is the runtime graph:

Do you prefer the outdoors life in 20F at the steep slopes of the Gellért Mountain right next to Hotel Géllert?
Or would you rather occupy a suite at Hotel Gellért in the genuine old Central European interior design
with a view of either the Danube or of that steep mountain and enjoy the central heating?
Added: Please accept your well deserved badge, mike047

Good Afternoon Base Campers!
mike047, you and I are the only ones here in Hungary, and the Hungarians ignore us. I have noticed that somebody read Base Camp’s posts in team Hungary’s thread, but whom they are we cannot tell.
acpartsman did not show up. I interpreted his words as a *yes, I’ll take a virtual trek to Hungary*. I may have been wrong. Oh, it seems reading his post now that he'll join tonight.
I'll use Ronald Reagan's catchword: Trust, but verify.
Aurum420, the unrule puppy, gave me the impression, but never really made any hard legal promise.
I may want to take lessons in … never mind

This shall not get us down, mike047. We’ll dive into Budapest, the two of us. Are you well rested? Is you cell phone greased in unable-to-rub-off massage oil? Did you have a robust meal at the breakfast buffet? Have you bundled up in layered clothing? Good shoes/boots for walking/climbing? Great! Let’s go.

We’ll go to the bank of the Danube and soon we walk along a huge building.
That is BME - Budapest University of Technology and Economics. This institution can be traced back to AD1635. Today 14,000 students receive tuition here, 800 of them from 50 different countries. You can study:
Civil Engineering
Mechanical Engineering
Architecture
Chemical Technology and Biotechnology
Electrical Engineering and Informatics
Transportation Engineering and Vehicle Engineering
Natural Sciences
Economic and Social Sciences
-a pretty goal oriented selection.
You will notice the roof, one of the trademarks of Hungarian roofing. Colored ceramic tiles in patterns that almost make you think Navajo. We'll see that roof far better when we go sailing downstream on the Danube.
On the backside of the building you'll notice a commemorative stone for the revolution/uprising in 1956, the first of many such reminders from those doomed days, we shall see on our walks in Budapest. It took most of a half century since that year for Hungary to gain freedom from the Soviet opression.
Budapest is full of libraries that will give any book afficionado/a and architectural ditto soft knees. Here is the BME one.

Actually we are at a very important place in modern Hungarian history.
"The 16 points that made up the political agenda of the revolution were created at the student rally held in the assembly hall of BME on 22 October, 1956. The next day the students of BME copied and distributed this list of demands throughout the city. That same day the silent demonstration that was followed by the toppling of Stalin’s statue, the siege of the national radio’s building, and the fight for freedom, started from BME, too."
Here you see that day commemorated

We’ll return to Hotel Gellért and take a look at the backyard with the outdoors hot spring pools. There’s something for us when the weather heats up.

Let’s take a cup of coffee before we climb Gellért Mountain. I hope you’re fit for it. I found it pulled teeth. You will find that you’re not babied with railings and so on as back home. You’re on your own. So watch your step, mike047
The first sight we meet is the Cave Church. The vast majority of Hungarians are Roman Catholics. They are not all that ready to open their country to Muslims which give conflicts with Big Brother EU. Hungary has a history of 150 years of oppression by the Ottoman Empire which historically can explain something.

As we wind our way up, one view after another pops up. The Danube, the bridges, the flat Pest part of the city. On the very top is the Citadella with a mighty large lady waving a palm leaf.

We’ll take our time looking around, begin our descent and pass St. Gellért spreading his blessings over the city below.

Down at the bank at the Danube we’ll marvel at the entrance of a tunnel leading through the Gellért Mountain at Erzsébet híd - the Elizabeth Bridge - and slowly we’ll walk along the Danube towards Hotel Gellért and a nap before dinner.
The boulevard on this stretch is named for Raoul Wallenberg, the affluent Swedish diplomat who succeeded in saving many Hungarian Jews during WW II. His disappearance in Soviet captivity is still shrouded in mystery.