Summer holiday on Balaton

With the succession of visitors and moving apartments it proved rather difficult to actually take a holiday in the summer, but we finally managed to organise five or six days during August.

Our plan was to escape Budapest after work one evening, stay somewhere on the north side of Lake Balaton, and the next day to drive to Slovenia and return early the next week.

Our plan failed to survive first contact with the enemy, as the Duke of Wellington predicted.

The first morning we woke up in our hotel in the little village of Tihany, on a peninsula sticking out into the lake and could barely move with tiredness. Months of suppressed exhaustion was starting to emerge in both of us. So we stayed in the Allegro Hotel for the next four nights until it was time to return to Budapest, and an excellent decision that was.

What did we do?

Balatonfured from Tihany

We wandered around the village, apparently the most popular tourist destination in Budapest after Szentendre, sitting in a cafe overlooking the lake, commenting on how it felt like we were on the Mediterranean.

We managed to be the last people to breakfast at 1020 every morning.

We rode our bikes down to the exclusive and private Club Tihany, slipped past the guards and swam on the private beach.

Enjoying the view

We walked across the vineyards, up into the hills and down to the other side of the peninsula to find a little beach where we could swim and wash our sweat away.

A quiet beach for a swim

Tihany from the Inner Lake

We went to a wine tasting with a local cellar owner, that turned into an extremely drunken evening discussing all manner of things Hungarian.

In fact, it was a very short but wonderful break.