Budapest rises from the hillsides on either side of the Danube in a tangle of spires, every bit as much the old warrior's helmet as the pinnacle of a cathedral. It is breathtaking. From our vantage point in the sturdy old Soviet hydrofoil, it indeed seemed to earn its self-proclaimed moniker, the "Pearl of the Danube, usurping the crown from even Vienna, which wins economically but loses when measured in charm. And it's hard not to like a capital city you can enter via a watercourse, rather than a airport chafing under its own security measures.

We left Vienna in the bright sun of early morning on a hydrofoil, bound 300 miles down the Danube to Budapest, gateway to the East. Of the several boats moored quayside at the Shiffahrtzentrum, I was surprised to discover ours was not one of the several multidecked, glassy vessels bobbing in the river current, but rather the squat, sealed vessel that looked to me like a half-submerged bus or a big blue cigar. It was either Russian- or Bulgarian-built, judging by the Cyrillic on the steel bulkheads, but it would take us all the way to Budapest in quiet comfort.

The Danube was broad and vaguely industrial around Vienna, and grey and wind-tossed by the time we reached Bratislava. Twice we labored through locks that lowered us over a hundred feet vertically: massive steel and concrete things as silent as the grave.

The year was 1890-something, the place an inauspicious village in the Bakony hills of northwestern Hungary. There, a young man by the name of Ferenc was tiring of the agricultural life of his village, Ajkarendek, where his family and a couple dozen others tilled fields of wheat and vegetables. But the New World was calling.

In May 2009 we visited Ajkarendek, Hungary, ancestral home of my own family, and found it very much a place to come home to.