I am a lucky guy. This is perhaps the most certain unrelenting fact of my still short life. Indeed, it has been made paramount to me the unparalleled opportunities I’ve been given to travel the globe to witness and experience a point of view foreign from my own. My parents always told me, usually in the car on a long road trip, “You know, we didn’t get family vacations like this when we were kids.” I count my blessings for every one of these trips, and for each new one that comes my way.
I say this not at all to gloat, but to this day I can’t recall a single summer I haven’t traveled from home. Whether on a meager weekend trip to four seasons Massanutten, Virginia (a trip I’m certain I took for granted and likely complained about the whole time I was there), a missions trip to an Indian reservation in New Mexico (with my church youth group) or a study abroad excursion into the Amazon Basin, it seems every year brings with it a new place for me to pin a tack on my digital world map. As a kid, I began a tradition I still practice today of collecting pins from every new place I visit. It started as a way to remember my ski adventures, mainly because I went skiing at least once or twice a season, and also because it’s one of the cheapest mementos you can collect. I find it fitting, then, that it be a pin to designate destinations visited on the Sosauce global footprint. If I were ever to show off anything from my travels it would be my pins – and my pins.
Why I am I telling you all this you ask? Well, because I like to reminisce, and because this summer the same old story of my life rings true again. I am less than two days away from leaving for Budapest – “the Paris of Central Europe” – and I still can’t believe it’s happening. It just sort of fell into my lap, really. Believe me, I take no pride in confessing to you travel geeks out there that this trip involved no planning of my own. I wish I could lie to you and say it did. But I won’t. I’ll give it to you straight. My girlfriend, Katie, had always told me of her Hungarian heritage and spoke very fondly of her grandfather, Csanad Toth, and his involvement with Truth magazine during the twelve days of the 1956 Revolution against the Soviet-imposed totalitarian regime. That’s a mouthful I know. After immigrating to the U.S. he eventually became the undersecretary to the Secretary of State during the Carter years, Cyrus R. Vance, and returned the crown of St. Stephen (Istvan) to the Hungarian Parliament. Stephen I, by the way, founded Hungary and made it a Christian nation in 1000 AD – his hand can still be seen in St. Stephen’s Basilica. All this leads me to the reason for the journey itself. Katie’s grandfather is something of a well known name in Hungary. Katie’s mother, Csanad’s daughter, was born here and has not visited since the mid 80′s. Sometime late last year she decided 2009, the year in which she turned 47, the same age as her father when he died of a heart attack, was the right time to return. Without so much as asking, she bought the tickets for the three of us and plans were set to stay with her cousin Laszlo in the hills of Buda. As I just found out recently, Buda and Pest were once actually two seperate cities but were joined in 1873.
Ok, I’ll admit, I’m really not one for planning anyway. I do, however, plan on taking many pictures and keeping a journal during our ten day stay. I’ll keep you posted.
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wow that is amazing ive been there and really enjoyed myself
whoa awesome turn of events, sounds like this Hungary trip will be a memorable one, enjoy!