The sun was out this morning at 5:30, and despite the horrible humidity, there was relief in the early warmth.  It also seems like at least here in Budapest, the Danube is gathering back into place, though you can see from these next few pictures that the road is still closed down here.  Further NW of us, the flooding has been a bit more severe.  In Austria, several little towns have had some challenges and in the eastern part of Czech Republic there have even been some deaths associated with the waters.  Here is some video from the BBC from yesterday about the flooding in the region.

These particular docks, past the Elizabeth Bridge, have been empty all summer.  Mostly I see men fishing from them in the morning, or young couples in the evening sitting there watching the sunset.  To the left is Margit Island, which is built up enough to protect it from these flood waters, and in the distance is the Árpád bridge, the longest bridge in Hungary (2km).  It was named after Árpád, the son of Álmos and second “grand prince” of the Magyars.  But construction was delayed on it because of WWII and when construction finished after the war, the communists were in charge and so for a time, the bridge was known as Sztálin híd.  I probably don’t need to translate that one.

Suffice it to say that the smaller riverboat cafe/restaurants are not open for business right now.

Unless you have a kayak.

Unfortunately for some travellers, some of the larger boats are also hotels.  In those cases it seems like the hotels have built little makeshift planks, which is the only word I can think of these little bridges because they remind me of the bridges we used to construct back in the old days when our summer entertainment was entirely wrapped around building treehouses and bridges made of scrap wood and downed vines to cross the forest creeks.

Traveling is an adventure, after all.  And probably by this weekend most of the storms will have passed and the rakpart road will re-open.  This time a year, almost nothing can quiet the little jewel of Central Europe.