Day 30
Airports 5
Bus Stations 6
Train Stations 8
Currency Exchanges 4

On the way from Budapest to Balatonfured.
So we got up this morning and spontaneously decided to go to the Lake Balaton area. The original plan was to check prices to Slovenia or Croatia, and to go shopping, but somehow, someway a few of our spontenaeity monitors spiked at the same time and we packed our stuff and metro'ed to the train station and here we are on the train.

Yesterday we decided to go caving. It was Mike, from Washington, and the two Australians (Jake and Elwood, the Blues Brothers.... seriously.... spitting image). We all met around 3 pm at a bus station. We had no idea what to expect, where our caving guide was going to come from, where we had to go to get to the caves, and why we were even doing this in the first place. The Aussies expected our guide to pop out of a man hole and point us down. None of us even knew there were caves in Budapest when we got here.
Finally, our guide showed up. He was a very small, very timid Hungarian who was always smiling, but in a nervous sort of way. He lead us onto a bus (everybody was kinda freaking out at this point because our guide was way too weird) and up, up a big hill on the Pest side of Budapest. There we exited the bus and entered a small cabin where we were each given a helmet with headlamp and a very dirty, smelly set of overalls. Seriously, they were disgusting... and mine were too big, the crotch hung down to the floor.
After signing a waiver (I was actually happy to see that they were organized enough to have one), we all began a short walk to a door that led to a tunnel, that lead to a ladder that went deep, deep into the ground.
What we experienced there was so freaking amazingly hardcore and cool, it totally rivaled the Cave of the Winds trip we did long, long ago in Colorado. It was a rock hard journey of crawling, slithering, and climbing though the cave. The cave was formed by the thermal waters so there were no stalagtites or mites. And no bats, which disappointed me since I kinda like the little furry creatures when they are hanging by there toes. What there was..... cool claustrophobic passways with nicknames like "the sandwich". It was really difficult, in some parts you could not move your head because you were in such a tight space, which make it impossible to see what is in front of you. The scariest part was having to wait in a teeny tiny space for the people in front of you to complete a particularly difficult part of the passageway and hearing the grunts and moans and cries of them getting stuck and freaking out.
That said, when you get done, you feel like a million bucks and like you can conquer the world. You also feel like having a REAL sandwich because after two hours, you have depleted your reserves.
The beer was especially tasty that night.