We pulled into Budapest’s beautiful Keleti train station shortly after noon on Friday and were engulfed into a killer heat wave. Usually when we go backpacking, we show up to a city without a place to stay, walk around the hostels and find the best deal but on this trip (high tourist season in Europe) so far, we have been booking all of our hotels a couple of days in advance through expedia. Deciding to try something different, we booked an “apartment suite” with a kitchenette at a hostel in the Corvin area through Booking.com so that we could have the option of cooking food instead of always eating out. When we got to our room in the hostel it was clear that this place hadn’t been cleaned for perhaps the entire summer. The place smelled ... read more

I love Austria! I can basically sum up our Austrian experience as: palace, apple streusel, film festival, palace, Wiener schnitzel, opera, palace, church, fortress, sound of music, Mozart, palace, church, chocolate cake. Repeat. We took the train from Munich to Vienna and arrived sometime in the early afternoon. Our hotel was nicely located about a 10 minute walk from the West Wien station (main centralish station), so it was quick to get to and check in. The weather was beautiful and it wasn’t long before we were learning a new city map and transit system to go find things to check out. Well good god, we got off at the Museum quarter and I almost died. This city is so damn gorgeous. There is an unreal amount of beautiful architecture, stunning statues, etc. We started with ... read more

We arrived in Amsterdam early on Sunday morning. Our google map walking directions lead us to believe that our hotel was only about a half hour walk from Amsterdam Centraal Station so we hoped that we would be able to check in early or drop our bags and come back to check in later. After getting lost about 10 times, 2 hours later, we arrived at our hotel completely spent from lugging around our big backpacks on the less than 3 hours of sleep that we had got on the plane. Our hotel is in a cute old canal house but with that comes classic old steep narrow staircases, and of course our hotel room was on the top floor! So after several flights of stairs up to our room I was more than happy to ... read more

We actually arrived in Cusco on July 16th and found a hostel that was pretty close to the Plaza. The altitude here is 3300m so we decided to rest a few days before starting our Machu Picchu adventure. Cheryl was pretty much out of commission for our entire stay in Cusco. It could have been the altitude pills or the altitude itself that was bothering her. What really got her was the combo of the altitude pills and Pepto. We didn’t know until it was too late that those two are not supposed to be combined and Cheryl became very sick. After a couple of days passed by, we were finally able to explore the town and booked a Machu Picchu trek as well as a city tour. We decided to go with the Inka Jungle ... read more

Arequipa is the place to get stranded at when your hostel manager screws up your reservation for your bus out of the city. It's definitely the best place we've stopped at in Peru so far. Great night life, great pastries, great prices, great gringos, great views, great everything. Of course, there are still sketch areas and people, but every city has those. As soon as we were dropped off at the bus station in Arequipa from Ica, we found a nice man offering us maps and information about the city. He even offered us a free ride to the Plaza and suggested a hostel that had everything we needed at a reasonable price. It turned out that he was the manager of the hostel he brought us to-- shocking. The place included breakfast, wi-fi, hot showers, ... read more