Tour de Czech Comes to an End

So today was our last day of biking... It was not a problem free day nor was it very graceful, but in my opinion we conquered the day. We biked for 7 very long hours and were exhausted and dehydrated by the time we finished. But we biked the whole way! I will spare you the play-by-play but will give the highlights and let's call them lowlights....

After a very restless nights sleep (I think because the town was haunted), and a bazaar breakfast, we got started on a very hilly day of biking. Any hesitation I had to go fast down hills before (from my previous bike accidents) was forced to disappear today. Most of the day we had extremely hilly terrain and we did a lot of very intense mountain biking. I had some close calls on some roots and rocks as we were flying down the steep banks. Jorie and I both had never done such intense mountain biking (seemed harder than Colorado divide trail) but we became experts by the end of the day.

We had another beautiful day of weather with clear skies and very sunny. There are many signs of fall on the countryside here, we even biked through a lot of fallen leaves. Our bike route today was along the Czech-Austria boarder. We biked right up to what is left of the Iron Curtain, and it was very interesting to see the remittence of the Cold War. The farther south we rode there were less farms and more vineyards.

Similarly to previous days we had our fair share of getting lost... We had one wrong turn that resulted in us ending up in Hardegg (it was the first town name in Czech that we could actually pronounce but we didn't need to because we weren't suppose to go there), which consumed far more than an hour of time and forced us to walk up a 4 km hill. Our other detours for today were not as painful or out of the way but still seemed to be time consuming.

At one point, we put our bikes down to stopped to check to see if we were on track, as we were looking at the map we heard the most dreadful noise... At first I hoped it was just a snake but no we were not that lucky. We looked down to see all the air out of Jorie's front tire to be gone.... It was as flat as a tire can get. It was so surreal, we both couldn't believe it, we couldn't help but laugh. We were on a dirt road with farm fields all around us, so there was no hope that our helpful Czech man would reappear. I tried to simulate exactly what the Czech man had done on day one... It wasn't working so well when along came, not one but a couple riding by. Luckily I had put my bike in the center of the path, so there was no way they could ignore/ escape us. They did not speak a word of English but we have gotten rather use to that by now. The man had a very hard time trying to fix it and he seemed to be getting very frustrated with it because he was yelling a lot in Czech. But then another couple came (I actually have no idea where these people came from on a Tuesday afternoon in the middle of nowhere). The two men duked it out and got the tire back in order, but they couldn't get the pump to work well enough, so they sent us to the nearest town to find a compressor. We thought it would take us hours to find one but luckily we found an open garage and a man working away in his workshop. We really lucked out with this flat tire.

When we were almost to Znojmo (our destination) we had to stop and ask for directions yet another time (side note, thank goodness we are females and are good about stopping to ask for directions). We apparently picked the wrong person because Jorie was stuck talking to this creepy man who wanted to practices his English for what felt like an eternity.

Znojmo is the biggest town we have seen since Prague, but is rather rough around the edges. We were elated to get to our clean hotel after such an exhausting day of biking in the sun.

We have enjoyed our time in the Czech Republic and feel we know the countryside almost intimately. We are excited to be done biking and head to Vienna tomorrow.


All the wildlife we have seen on the past 4 days of biking (much of which has been through forests):
- a small and very dark squirrel... Rather scary
- a hare... Yup, that's it

Lessons we have learned while in the Czech Republic:
- pay the extra money for a guided tour
- my dad is right, everything in life in moderation, that includes biking.... So if you want to bike somewhere don't bike more than 25 miles a day and only bike for 3 days.
- also, when picking a bike tour pick someplace like Iowa rather than San Francisco....
- "This is the Czech Republic- lock everything!"- our hotel manager at the first Inn
- Czech's love porn... There are over 40 channels on the TV in our room
- Czech's also love smoking cigarettes... ANYWHERE
- do NOT expect people to speak English anywhere besides Prague

The Czech Republic is beautiful and we hope you all can someday see it, but will hopefully not get to know as intimately as we have.