Been donkey’s years, as the Brits would say, since I did a list. It’s time. This one is going to be a little apples-and-oranges. My favorite road trips as a professional sports journalist. Some considerations: –What is more important? The travel? Or the event I was there to cover? –Or will we almost certainly get […]

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I never played soccer as a child. Never saw a match. Didn’t own a soccer ball. Never knew anyone who followed the game. The extent of my pre-adult exposure to soccer probably was occasional videotape on ABC’s Wide World of Sports; presumably World Cup highlights; lots of Pele. By the early 1980s, I was the […]

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And I thought it was my idea. No, really. Someone already on the continent who is keen to see some well-known capitals of Europe that are not the usual London, Paris, Berlin, et al. Let’s get out a map … Hey, wait! Budapest, Vienna and Prague are arranged more or less on a straight line […]

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If you hope to dine like a local, in central Europe, you start by accepting one condition: You must order a beer with your meal. Or else you are an even bigger poseur than most of the rest of the tourists visiting the region. Which has led me to drink beer for nine consecutive days […]

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We liked Budapest. Quite a bit. We wish we were staying longer. But a couple of basic issues pertaining to Hungary and its capital city threatened to trip us up every time we left the apartment. Talking about money … and talking about talk.

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I get it. Some might consider it silly, ridiculous even, to be headed for a sports bar on a Wednesday night while visiting an exotic capital city. But keep in mind that 1) the sports bar is about 50 yards away from where we are staying; 2) the bar serves food as well as beer […]

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I was in Budapest for a few days, in March of 1990, to cover the U.S. national soccer team in a pre-World Cup friendly loss, 2-0, to Hungary. (A few days later I covered the Yanks in East Berlin; East Germany won 3-0.) So this was all just the other day. Back then, Hungary already […]

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We spent most of the day on a train. From Prague to Brno (in the Czech Republic) to Bratislava (in Slovakia) to the marvelously named Szob (in Hungary) to Vac to Budapest. It was fairly direct. Not a “crow flies” kinda straight line but one that takes into account that people might actually want to […]

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