[Editor's note: Can't find my notes from this day or the next... will try to remember what happened.]
In the morning we fought the crowds at the Prague castle (which has like a whole town inside of it) and back across the famous bridge that would probably be really enchanting if one wasn't shoulder to shoulder with tourists and caricature artists. We picked up our luggage and dashed for the train station. Overall we weren't that pleased with Prague. Prague became a destination after the wall came down because it was such a nice unspoiled old world city. Unfortunately, it's not so unspoiled anymore. It's "the previous previous Ljubljana" and it shows.
A final note about Prague is how much we really liked the metro. See photos. Especially take a close look at the icons, particularly the girls' skirts and the other accessories depicted.
Mary wanted to return to an enchanting castle ruin in rural southern Czech Republic that she'd visited with her folks back in 1993. Back then, it wasn't developed for tourism at all. We found it through a person we were staying with, who directed us to bicycle to a particular path into the woods where we eventually found it. We also heard a cuckoo bird in the woods that day, which sounded just like my parent's old cuckoo clock from Germany.
Well, in our attempt to go back, we located the castle on Google maps and noted that there is a train station in the town just a kilometer away. Not so hard to get to as I remembered. Sweet. So we took two trains to get to the little town of Trisov in the evening around 6 or 7pm. Upon arrival, we discovered that there is no place to stay in Trisov. With some difficulty, we found the one restaurant (really more of a bar) in town and they confirmed that there was nowhere for us to stay, unless we had camping gear in which case we could camp near the castle. Oops.
The notes from Mary's parents suggested that there might be somewhere to stay in the town of Kremze, 4 km away from Trisov. So we set out on foot down the country road past field and forest. A little outside Holubov we started seeing signs for accommodations. Well, a sign for one 4 km away, and another an unspecified distance. In Holubov stopped to ask someone outdoors about accommodations. That person didn't speak much English, but soon we had attracted a bit of a crowd. They all thought that we should walk 2 km up the road (away from the railroad tracks, which we had been roughly following) to the nice cheap pension up there. But they did concede that there was a place to stay in Holubov, they just didn't think we should go there as it was really expensive. We pressed as to what they meant by "very expensive," and eventually were told that it was more than 200 Koruna, maybe a lot more than 200 Koruna. 200 Koruna is about $10 so we decided to give it a try. Apparently even though Prague is now almost as expensive as any other big city in Europe, people are still a lot poorer in the countryside. Not that this comes as any great surprise.
We found the pension on the other side of a lake with a slide and strange structure in it. Mary was reminded of swimming in the reservoir with the Czech kids when she was in the Czech Republic before. The room turned out to be a princely 700 Koruna per night, around $35, but we were mighty glad to have it. We had a splendid dinner, including a wonderful pasta dish with poppy seeds.
It was a really good day. We definitely got well off the beaten track, but did not find ourselves feeling frightened. It helps that it was right around the Summer Solstice so the daylight lasted well into the evening as we hunted for a place to stay. And there is something profoundly cool about walking from town to town in Europe... it really feels like you are on some epic journey out of a fantasy book. Later in the evening we took a stroll down to the train station to check on the next day's schedule. It was lovely.
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