End of August, the family and I finally took the trip we badly needed. This time we picked Hungary, first time for all of us. Five days in Budapest, five days at Lake Balaton.
The city part went beautifully. We ate an irresponsible number of kürtőskalács. The English name is “chimney cake,” because that’s the shape: a hollow spiral of dough turned over coals and rolled in sugar and cinnamon. It is also, conveniently, the exact fixture you will no longer fit through next Christmas if you keep eating them. We ate enough of them that by the end I had the body of one. Worth it.
Then there’s the cone-shaped version, which exists purely so that it can hold things. Nutella inside. Ice cream on top. Whipped cream on top of that, just to be certain. It is less a pastry than a delivery system for eventual diabetes, and I have no regrets.
Between the sightseeing and the shopping, both genuinely nice, I’m not being sarcastic yet, we rented a car and pointed it at the lake.
Five suitcases
We left Budapest with five suitcases, which was the hard line I’d drawn with my wife.
I want to be clear that I hold no authority in this house and have no intention of pretending otherwise. I didn’t forbid a sixth suitcase. I simply observed that past five, the rental car becomes a minivan, and the minivan becomes a minibus, and the price follows accordingly. She caved to the arithmetic. Not to me.
And it held. Everything still fit when we pulled out of the city. My wife and my teenage daughter were, at that point, under control.
That control went out the window at roughly the same moment we reached the lake.
The place itself
My wife plans our trips, and she found us something lovely: a small resort right on the water, a dozen or so wooden cabins. Quiet. Immaculate. Lawns trimmed to within an inch of their lives, trees, bushes, nature in its full glory.
And, as it turns out, mosquitoes in their full glory as well.
A new kind of enemy
I know mosquitoes. I grew up with the standard model: the one that whines past your ear at 3 a.m. and then bites you. I’ve never been able to decide which half of that I hate more.
Balaton settled it for me. Around this lake there is a mosquito that doesn’t bite at all. It only screams. And it screams so loudly that two of them in a room can be heard from the other side of it.
Which brought me to a position I never expected to hold: I would rather be bitten. Let them bite. Let me find out in the morning. Anything is better than lying under a duvet in August trying to muffle the sound.
There are so many of them that you can’t see clearly more than twenty meters out, sixty-five feet, for my American readers, and that is the only conversion you’re getting from me today. It’s a green haze. And they are not shy. They fly straight into you and settle in. Do not yawn without covering your mouth. Be thoughtful about sneezing. And thank God I wasn’t doing anything aerobic out there, because heavy breathing in that airspace feels like a trip to the emergency room.
Sea person. Not a lake person.
Here’s what I learned about myself.
I live near a beach and near several lakes, and the beach is both closer and better. Nothing beats the sun, the sand, the crash of the waves.
Am I paranoid about deep water? Obviously. Same as the next guy. The moment it’s deep enough that I don’t know what’s under me, my brain starts filing reports. But I still go in. I swim, I dive, I enjoy myself.
Lakes are where I stop.
Balaton is shallow, genuinely shallow, you can walk out a long way, but the water is opaque. You cannot see five centimeters down. I did warn you about the conversions.
And you’re walking on mud. It squeezes up between your toes at exactly the wrong consistency: creepy, but not quite terrifying. The terrifying part is held in reserve for the moment you step into a small hole where the mud is suddenly deeper and slicker than it was a second earlier. That one got me properly.
But my kids were there, and my kids were having a wonderful time and didn’t mind any of it, so bravery had to be performed. I did not put my head under. I went in body only, head firmly above the waterline, because it was hot and I’m not made of stone, and I prayed quietly that no kraken and no freshwater tentacle situation out of Lord of the Rings was living down there with me.
I’m pleased to report I held it together and did not infect my children with my neuroses.
The graveyard
What did not help was looking closely at the surface.
A fine film of dead mosquitoes floats on top of the water. Thousands of them. An even layer of small corpses.
Which leaves you standing there, caught between two feelings at once: real satisfaction at seeing the little bastards dead, and the slowly arriving understanding that you are currently marinating in a warm green soup made by steeping them.
We had a genuinely wonderful time. I’d just like a word with whoever is in charge of that lake.
Meanwhile, my daughter had located a store
Here is something nobody warns you about the countryside. There are no shops in it.
My daughter is a teenager. She loved Budapest, and she loved it specifically because Budapest is a city that contains stores. My two boys were politely bored by the shopping and much preferred every other attraction on offer, a position I respected and which changed nothing whatsoever.
At the lake, surrounded by water, forest and a standing air force, my daughter discovered that she could not breathe normally without visiting a shop.
So we stopped. On the way to the lake. On the way back from the lake. On the way to and from everything else. Not malls: standalone outlets of familiar fashion brands, sitting out by the road. Nothing posh. C&A and its cousins.
And here is what finished me off. It was cheaper than at home. Not dramatically cheaper, not enough to justify anything, but cheaper, and cheaper is the only word a teenager needs to hear. I stopped objecting somewhere around the second stop, because this time the arithmetic was on their side, and we have already established what happens to me when there’s arithmetic.
The suitcase, revisited
Which brings us back to the luggage.
Somewhere in the middle of all that, my wife announced that after all this shopping, the family had earned a new suitcase.
I said fine. But we buy it in Budapest, at the end, because there is physically nowhere to put it.
She didn’t believe me. So I showed her the trunk.
They say a picture is worth a thousand words. A fully loaded trunk is worth about three, and for once they were all mine.
If this earned a laugh, you can buy me a coffee at ko-fi.com/snarkydad. No obligation, no judgment, just caffeine.
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