Budapest (Fall 2023)
Greetings, fellow travelers. Let me tell you about our fall half term trip. Now that our small humans are squarely in primary school our travel is limited to term breaks (whereas when they were younger we had more flexibility). This year (2023), their fall half term was quite late in October and stretched into November. We traveled for this trip from 29 October to 4 November. We took this trip because Hubs had found that there’s a night train between Budapest and Prague, and while they’re starting to outgrow it, T1 and T2 were obsessed with trains when they were even smaller humans, so we thought this would be a fun and unique trip. We also went to Prague on this trip, which you can read more about here.
We flew into Budapest to start our trip. We’d traveled to Budapest before in September 2018, and really liked the vibe of the town. Even though it was the end of summer during our last trip, we were moderately limited by some heavy rain. On both our visits to Budapest, I’ve found the city to be family friendly, easy to navigate, and residents to be generally friendly and open.
When we landed, we knew that we could easily take a bus into the city because we’d done it before. You can read about how to do that here. One thing that was super easy on this trip is that Budapest has really improved their transit app. We bought physical tickets at the airport, but retrospectively we should have downloaded the app ahead of time. Registering is the most annoying part, as usual, but once you’re through the set up process it’s super easy to use. You can find the app by searching for BKK in the Google Play or App stores; it’s a purple and white icon (Click here for the BKK app in the Google Play store). Just a pro tip: at the time of this trip (October 2023), our children were 8 and there were no children’s tickets. I assume under a certain age kids don’t pay, but on this trip we did have to pay full ticket price for our kids on buses//trains. There was no information on this in the app; I confirmed with the clerk at our hotel front desk, and a friendly server in a restaurant we visited.
We stayed for this trip at Danubius Hotel Astoria. It was a well connected location, and we had a huge room. We had 1.5 bathrooms, and two full bedrooms. Our room rate included breakfast, which was only mediocre, but even a mediocre hotel breakfast is generally worth not having to take hungry kids out searching for breakfast. It felt like the hotel was outdated, sort of like it was past its prime (especially in the lobby), but absolutely the room was clean and comfortable. We were there in October, so this wasn’t relevant to us, but we did read in some reviews that there’s no air-con, or it doesn’t work well. For us, the run down//outdated aspect was a worthwhile trade-off for the amount of space we had as well as the central location.
By the time we arrived and checked into our hotel on the 29th, we needed dinner as soon as humanly possible. We did some unpacking and just gave our kids a few minutes in the hotel room to unwind from a long travel day. I opened up Google Maps and just scrolled around a bit, looking for restaurants within a few minutes walk of our hotel. I saw this place, Parisi 6, and it seemed like a place worth trying. We walked up, and were able to get a table that had a late reservation. It’s a small place with a narrow menu (no specific kid’s menu), but the food was delicious and the staff was friendly. They did turn away probabaly half a dozen groups who arrived while we were dining that didn’t have reservations, so if you’re really interested I’d suggest making a reservation.
We had previously visited Buda Castle and done the funicular, as well as Fisherman’s Bastion, which are all things I recommend, but for the sake of brevity I’m not going to get into them now since we didn’t visit them on this trip. We were lucky to have gorgeous fall weather while we were in Budapest, so I was very exicted to head to Margaret Island on our first day. Margaret Island is, not surprisingly, an island in the Danube. You can take the street car and walk down from the bridge onto the island, which will put you out near the musical fountain. I really wanted to rent bikes to bike around the island, and we did, but man. The bike rental companies did not make it easy; it felt like they did not want my money. We ultimately went with Go Mobility, but it was a production. It was busy, because the weather was so nice, and I guess the guy’s card reader wasn’t working, or he didn’t have it, so at the time he could only accept cash, which we didn’t have. It’s fine; it worked out in the end, but he could made it easier in about a dozen different ways and he did not. I only persevered because I really wanted to bike this island, and we did have a really good time. We biked a loop of the island, and got out at a few sites (but skipped the zoo, as our small humans were getting really hungry) and still returned our bikes in about 90 minutes. Then, we walked back down the path and ate a light lunch outside.
After lunch, we left Margaret Island we took a long stroll through Budapest. It’s a good city for walking; wide sidewalks and straight streets. We also, in general, are suckers for a river cruise. Given that it was October and the nights were long, we planned to do a rive cruise at 5:15 pm, so we could see the city lit up at nighttime and still have dinner at a reasonable time. We used this company, and it was quite nice. We started up top, but about two thirds of the way through our kids got chilly and I went inside to sit with them. It’s an audio guide, so you just listen and follow along. Everyone liked it, and when we finished we walked into town and were able to easily find a restaurant for dinner. We ate in a restaurant called Százéves Étterem, which is apparently the oldest restaurant in Budapest. A hotel clerk recommended it to us. The food was good, and the portions were quite large, but it did feel a bit more gimicky than the usual places we go, or perhaps more like it relied on tourist business.
The next day, we went to Széchenyi Thermal Bath. I had actually felt confused about booking the baths in the run up to our trip; I read on their website and the website of other baths as well, and almost all of them said that kids couldn’t really participate on their website, but I had also read in unofficial places that people had taken their children. So in the end, we decided not to pre-book, and just show up and see what they said to us. We specifically chose the day with the worst weather of our trip, because if we were already in the thermal bath we figured some extra rain wouldn’t bother us. In the end, no one even blinked at our kids entering (although I did hear them saying something to a couple entering with a young baby). The only downside is that there’s no kid rate, which really isn’t the end of the world. Your entry includes use of a locker, but you can pay a bit more for a changing cabin that locks as well. We did that, for just one person so we went in, found our changing cabin and 1 adult went to change with 1 kid, then we swapped. Honestly, Michael and I thouhght we might spend the morning at the baths, if we really stretched it out. We were 100% wrong. We happily spent the entire day, and only left around 5 because we all needed to take showers and change before dinner. Like a terrible writer, I forgot to drop a pin where we ate on Tuesday, but I kind of feel like we indulged our kids with an Italian restaurant.
Our last day in Budapest was Wednesday, and we had BEAUTIFUL weather and no real plans. We packed up, stored our luggage with the front desk of our hotel, and headed out to see what we could find. We meandered through the Pest side of town, ultimately crossing the Erzsébet Bridge to the Buda side. There was a clear path up right where we crossed the bridge, so we decided to take it and at the top of the hill was a statue and some nice views of the city. After we snapped a few pics, there was a clear walking path so we figured we’d follow it and see what happened. Essentially, we followed the outiline of this hill all the way down the river, in the direction of Gellert Cave and Central Market Hall (which is where we planned to eat lunch).
It was a nice walk and the weather was beaufitul. PLUS, we found this amazing playground towards the end and definitely let T1 and T2 stop to play a bit. It was full of families, because schools were closed for All Saints’ Day (1/11), but it’s a massive playground. I’d even say that if your kids are close to being too old or too cool for a playground they might like this one. After we’d let our kids play for a bit, we carried on down off the hill and ended up Gellert Cave and crossed over the Szabadság híd and planned to grab lunch at the Central Market. Except that we were foiled by the holiday (whomp, whomp). It was a total rookie mistake, so we called an audible and took the tram to Street Food Karavan Budapest for lunch. It was outdoors, but they have a big variety of food trucks and loads of picnic tables. After all tummies were full, we went back to our hotel, collected our bags, and headed to the train station. We wanted to give ourselves enough time to find something to bring onto the train for dinner, as well as locate and board our train without feeling rushed. We were taking a night train, and we learned everything about the night train from The Man in Seat 61. He even was incredibly helpful when my husband reached out to him over a problem with booking. If you ever have questions or are intrigued by the idea of train travel, he’s your guy.
With that, we’ve come to the end of our most recent Budapest journey. If you’ve come all the to the bottom, here’s the TL;DR: Budapest is a great town for family travel. We’ve been twice and we’d go back again.