Ryan’s Eagle Scout Project- Part IV

After the vans were all loaded up the night before Chris took the little boys an hour away to the Chuggs house, who were so wonderful to watch them while we were gone.    Megan headed off to school on the bus and then spent the next four days with our good friends, the Gillespie's.   Several of our other friends helped out by watching a couple of the Nelson and Peterson kids.  The phrase… “It takes a village to raise a child” could also be worded as… “It takes a village to get an Eagle.”  We are so grateful for everything that everyone did to support Ryan (and us) in this monumental project.

On the Road…  The Petersons and Nelsons met at our house at 9:00 and we took off for Budapest.  Here we are at one of our bathroom breaks with our Almdudler Soda – that you can only get in Austria.  Heidi couldn’t describe the flavor to us and even after we tasted we couldn’t quite describe the flavor either.  But good!  That’s the entire caravan group – minus me!

See Ryan with that laptop above?  That’s because most of the drive up and back from Budapest he was working on getting his final Project Plan and ‘Post Write Up’ written.  Like I’ve said before, SO MUCH PAPERWORK, PAPER SIGNING, EMAILING, DOCUMENTING HOURS and SPREADSHEETS.   It was good (?) to get a lot done while we travelled.  Because we wanted to have his Eagle Court of Honor here in Germany before we left, we were on a tight schedule to get done in time.

The kids were so packed in the van.  Poor Jenny was squished too.

Our first gas stop into Hungary, which was full serve.

The cold windy unload… We had arranged to meet up with Patricia at a big store’s parking lot to transfer all of the donations from our vans into her trailer as soon as we got into Budapest.   We spend a couple minutes in the grocery store checking it out and looking for a few treats to buy and then went outside when they arrived.   It was fun to meet Patricia and her husband.  She were instantly friends since we had been emailed back and forth so many times in the past couple of months.  Ryan explained that the three vans had been packed according to the three homes that we were going to visit and Patricia said, “I could tell from the emails that this was going to be organized.”  She could see through the bags to some of the toys and was getting excited about what we had gathered.   We loaded the trailer into three sections plus an area for the things specifically for Patricia – among them: root beer, peanut butter, and stuff for smores.

It was so cold and windy!  

Into downtown Budapest… After the drop off we headed another 10 minutes into downtown Budapest.  Our hotel ended up being in the perfect location right in the heart of the city.  Funny to say but other than borrowing a BUDAPEST Rick Steves book from the library, we did exactly zero reading up on the city and had NO idea what it would be like.  Probably because of that, our entrance into the city was even more breathtaking.  We drove in at about 8:00 at night so the pictures below (not mine) are exactly what it looked like as we drove over that bridge and into town.  Amazing!!

The hotel was easy to find but the parking was a bit trickier.  We had pre-purchased parking in a parking garage (we were told NOT to park on the streets) and it took a couple of minutes to wind through the streets to find it.  Each of our apartments were in a different building around the courtyard, and once we got it all figured out we settled into our rooms and quickly headed to bed.