Budapest: Day3, A Field Guide to Finding What You Weren't Looking For

Day three. Or: What Happens When You Can't Import a GPX File.

I set out to ride to Göd and ended up asking a dead man where I should live.

The original itinerary was less ambitious.

Thirty-two kilometres north along the Danube. Mostly flat. A bike path for much of it. The sort of ride for which I had brought a bicycle, rather than the sort for which one needs a revelation.

First, however, I had to get a GPX file into my Garmin.

This nearly ended the expedition.

The file contained nine tracks. Garmin Connect imported the first, discarded the others, and presented the result with the quiet confidence of software that considers its own completion of a task sufficient evidence of success. In other words, 'task failed sucessfully'

The first track started in Vienna.

I was in Budapest.

This was an unhelpful distinction to have to explain to a navigation product.

The file came from the EuroVelo route information. EuroVelo 6 runs from the Atlantic to the Black Sea, following rivers including the Loire and the Danube. It is an undertaking on a continental scale, with connections across borders, languages, and jurisdictions. My particular difficulty was the last few centimetres between my phone and my bicycle computer.

I tried the phone app. Failed. Tried the website. Failed. Tried converting formats. Failed differently, which briefly felt like progress.

Garmin had retained Austria and eaten everything I needed in Hungary. Vác, the Danube Bend, Göd: gone. A very small empire had collapsed inside my phone.

I sent the file to Sarah. She built a clean GPX in about thirty seconds and sent it back. Telegram then declined to deliver it, because apparently the various applications were taking shifts. I guess a singularity level artificial general intellgence can slip ocassionally, though as she learns at a geometric rate, this happens much more rarely than you might expect, but noteworthy none the less.

I discovered this after leaving the apartment, standing on a street corner in Budapest with a bicycle, no useful route, and a phone offering an optimistic account of the situation.

At a certain point, continuing to solve the technology becomes a way of avoiding the thing you wanted to do, so as the yongers like to say I went "Full send" on the mission.

The river was still there. Hungary had not been deleted. I'll figure this out old school with a cell phone and google maps.

Without the route, I ended up on secondary roads. Side streets. Residential cut-throughs. The bits of a city that hold the more photographed bits together.

The roads were gnarly. On the Venge, a poor surface is communicated promptly and in considerable detail directly into your ass. Carbon fibre is an excellent engineering material and an unsympathetic editor of the road beneath you.

There were potholes, awkward stretches, traffic I would have preferred at a greater distance. There were also houses, industrial edges, trees, and ordinary places I would have bypassed if the morning had worked correctly.

I was seeing the country in the spaces between the recommended experiences.

Then I found the cycle route.

Actual tarmac. Signs. A path beside the Danube, existing quite happily without confirmation from Garmin.

The relief was physical. Less attention spent negotiating the surface, more available for the river and the country opening around it. The bike settled into the job it was built for. So did I.

There is a special satisfaction in finding something that an application has made unnecessarily difficult to believe in. I had spent the morning failing to obtain a line on a screen. Here was the line beneath my wheels.

I followed it north to Göd.

Göd has an umlaut, which saves the title of this expedition from making an even larger theological claim than my holiday has already accumulated.

It is a town on the eastern bank of the Danube, north of Budapest. It also as a closely neighnoring town, amusingly called "Also Göd", like that plucky little brother who also wants to be noticed. Göd's own tourism description calls it a gateway to the Danube Bend. That is a useful distinction. I had reached an entrance to a larger landscape, with more river and more riding beyond it.

The famous sweep of the Bend lay further upstream. Today, Göd was enough.

I had ridden out of the city, watched the surroundings change, and arrived somewhere I had intended to reach despite considerable assistance from the technology industry.

The railway supplied the return journey. By this time my thoroughly pothole tenderized posterior was ready to part with $2.00 for a ticket. Bike onto the train, me alongside it, and the corridor back through Dunakeszi towards Budapest passing the window at a different pace.

There is a pleasure in travelling back through a place you have just ridden. Your legs know something about the distance that the timetable leaves out. A stretch that required attention and effort is suddenly scenery.

The bicycle came with me. The journey worked. I could return to Carol with a ride behind me and enough afternoon left for us to go somewhere together.

We decided on Parliament and a walk beside the Danube.

The Országház sits on the Pest bank with the confidence of a building that intends to be included in every photograph of the river.

It looks ancient in the way that a sufficiently determined nineteenth-century architect could make something look ancient. Parliament began meeting there in 1902; construction was completed in 1904. The Gothic spires suggest a much longer acquaintance with eternity.

I like that kind of ambition in a public building. Somebody had to argue for all those details. Somebody else had to carve them. Whatever one thinks of the occupants, the building itself appears committed to the country.

We walked the riverbank. There was the 1956 memorial, another encounter with a history that keeps interrupting an otherwise beautiful afternoon.

Then the shoes.

Sixty pairs of iron shoes at the edge of the Danube. Men's, women's, children's. The memorial recalls the people, many of them Budapest Jews, murdered here by Arrow Cross militiamen in 1944-45. Victims were made to remove their shoes before being shot into the river.

The shoes had value to the men doing the killing. The people wearing them had been denied it.

There is very little a visitor can usefully add to that arrangement of empty footwear. The scale is human. You know what it means to leave your shoes somewhere. You expect to return to them.

The river continues beside them.

Hungary's history has a way of making the warmth I encounter here feel more precious. People have endured a great deal on these banks. Yet I keep meeting generosity, curiosity, a willingness to talk. I think of the police officer who came up a hill to investigate my red light and stayed to look at another galaxy.

It would be easy to turn that into a grand theory about the Hungarian heart. I only have the people I have met. They have given me plenty to love.

Further along, there were steps down towards the water.

I went down.

The Danube was low. Much lower than the river contained in the neat outline of a map. The water had drawn back and exposed ground that usually belonged to it.

Budapest had already experienced record low water during the summer's drought. Here was the part of that story you could stand on: the river's absence made into somewhere to put your feet.

I walked out onto the exposed riverbed.

Above me, the city had buildings, names, memorials, and explanations. Down here, there was water, uncovered ground, and a question I had carried much further than thirty-two kilometres.

Nagypapa. Johann Geisler. My great-grandfather.

He left this country and helped build a life in Canada with his own hands. His son grew the wheat that fed soldiers through two world wars. That is part of the family story I carry: departure, work, land, contribution to the foundation of a country. People making a future in a place they believed would become home.

I had come back to the river of his country with doubts about mine.

I don't feel welcome in Canada the way I once did.

That is an uncomfortable thing to say about the place where you were born.

Invader. Trespasser. Colonizer.

Those words circulate in the arguments about land and belonging, and I cannot hear them as though they refer only to a diagram in somebody else's presentation. I hear them with my family behind me and my children ahead of me.

I was born there. My body was made from that place: its food, its water, the ordinary material of a life. My children were born there. I had imagined grandchildren growing up there, too.

How many generations does it take before the answer to "Where are you from?" is allowed to be the place where you are born?

In British Columbia, the argument has a particular weight. Land Back is a phrase with enormous force, and when I hear it I want to know what future is being proposed for the people already making their lives on that land. Where do we stand? What is being asked of us? What can we tell our children about the security of their place in the country?

DRIPA, promised greater certainty. I am entitled to judge that promise by what happens to people trying to live and work under it.

In its April 2026 member survey, the Business Council of British Columbia found that 74 per cent of respondents reported reduced investment plans associated with DRIPA, and 41 per cent reported harder access to outside financing. These were 88 respondents to a business organisation's survey, describing their experience. They were also people making decisions about whether to put money into the province. Their answers deserve more than a reassuring adjective from the premier.

Alongside that sits the separate Cowichan title dispute in Richmond. A landowner said in court documents that a lender had denied it $35 million in financing because of the ruling. The province subsequently announced plans for more than$150 million in loan guarantees for owners in the affected area. Whatever assurances are offered, that is an expensive amount of reassurance to require. One is permitted to wonder who pays the bill when things all go wrong?

I also want someone to account for the consequences people are living with while governments, courts, and negotiators work through them.

Uncertainty has a cost before anyone loses a court case. A project waits. A lender hesitates. A family postpones a decision it cannot afford to get wrong. Being told that the final outcome is unresolved does not reimburse the years spent inside the question.

I'm neurodivergant. Pattern recognition is part of how I make sense of the world. Sometimes I see the connections before I can explain every step that brought me there. Having to reconstruct the explanation does not make the pattern disappear while I work on it.

Here is what catches my attention: assurances, unresolved claims, lenders hesitating, the province offering guarantees. I find myself following that sequence beyond the immediate case. If the uncertainty spreads, how far can the guarantees follow it? At what point does the institution supplying the reassurance become another thing we have to worry about?

I recognise a pattern I cannot yet prove will reach its conclusion. That does not make it invisible to me. And waiting for certainty may mean waiting until the consequences are already here.

And beneath the financial uncertainty is the more personal one: the feeling that my belonging, my existance is becoming something I am expected to defend while everyone else discusses it. And suddenly those shoes become another important pattern, and an disturbing concern.

I want a future in which my children can contribute without feeling that their ancestry places their welcome permanently under review. I want to know what reconciliation asks them to do, and where it allows them to belong. Those are fair questions. I resent the idea that asking them should itself require an apology.

I can face what happened before I was born. I can take responsibility for what I do while I am alive. I need a place for the living person in that conversation, too. I cannot be asked to pay the debts of harm, that occured before I existed. That would make me a debt slave, another abhorant part of human history I had hoped we had dispensed of as a civilized society.

If my contribution is welcome but my belonging is conditional, eventually I have to ask what I am staying for.

People can leave. Families can take their work, their investment, their businesses, and the futures they were going to build somewhere else. We can take our GDP and go, if that is the only language in which the loss becomes legible.

But GDP is a cold way to describe the thing I would actually be taking.

It would be my life. The years still ahead of me. The ordinary expectation that I might grow old in the country where I began.

I don't want to have to price that as an export.

I carried all of that down the steps. The survey data, the financing denials, the feeling of a country receding underneath you. None of it had an answer yet. But the water was there, and I had a question for someone older than the argument.

That was the question I brought down to the waters of the Danube.

You left here, Johann. You crossed into a different life and built something. You made a decision whose consequences eventually included me.

What do I do now?

Do I come back here, where you came from? Is this returning, if I have never lived here? Do I go somewhere else and start the family's migration over again?

How do you know when leaving is courage, and when it is simply being tired?

I asked him.

Then I looked down.

There was a coin.

A Hungarian one-forint coin. Dated 1981.

Magyar Népköztársaság. Hungarian People's Republic.

A name for the state that no longer exists, on a piece of money that can no longer buy anything, lying at my feet while I asked where I belonged.

The coin was almost weightless, it is made from an aluminium alloy. Very little material to carry forty-five years and a defunct political order.

Forty-five years after the date stamped into it, the river had drawn back, and there it was.

I asked the question. I looked down. One small coin at my feet.

One.

My day had begun with a file containing nine tracks, of which the technology would permit me to keep one, the wrong one. Now I was standing in the riverbed with another one in my hand, and this time I had no interest in asking a device what it meant.

One forint. One beginning. One small thing to take with me.

I don't know what it means.

I am reluctant to spoil that by pretending I do.

Of all the things I might have seen when I looked down, that was what was there.

I had asked a man who left Hungary about the country I should call home. The river offered a coin bearing a version of Hungary that had itself passed into history.

Countries change. The names stamped onto them change. People keep trying to build lives inside the arrangements.

I stood there holding one of the old arrangements between my fingers.

At dusk, on the Pest side, I touched the water.

Cold enough to feel. Warm enough to leave my hand in it for a moment. Then I lifted it and let the river run off my fingers.

Johann may have travelled along this water on his way out. I don't know his exact route. I can imagine a riverboat passing beneath the Chain Bridge, a man looking back or deliberately refusing to, a life already separating into before and after.

I don't know whether he touched the water.

But the water doesn't know the difference between one hand and another. It just flows.

Then Carol and I walked the bridge.

The Széchenyi Chain Bridge opened in 1849, the first permanent bridge between Buda and Pest. William Tierney Clark designed it; Adam Clark supervised its construction. An Englishman and a Scotsman, contributing to the shape of a Hungarian city.

I found that detail companionable.

The bridge has been rebuilt since. The crossing survives through work, repair, and the decision to keep connecting the two banks.

Its chains are visible. You can look at the links, the towers, the hangers carrying the deck, and see something of the load finding its way to the ground. I liked that about it. The same part of me that stopped to examine an escalator's mechanism could appreciate a bridge that gave the eye enough information to follow the work.

Earlier in the day, I had wanted a route I could trust. Now I was walking one.

There was no answer written into the iron. Nothing about Canada, nothing about where we should go, nothing that converted a one-forint coin into a set of instructions.

I had questions for him. I asked. The bridge didn't answer.

But it held, which is what bridges are for.

And I walked it with Carol, which is what people do when they've found what they were looking for and still don't know what it means.

Next: maybe Győr. Maybe the Danube Bend at night with a telescope. Maybe that's a different post.