It’s bloody cold in the Czech Republic! Not sure what’s happened but the temperature has dropped around 15 degrees so I’m back to wearing jumpers, jackets and scarves – but it hasn’t stopped us exploring.
We started our trip by looking for a garage to buy the vignette (road tax) so we could travel on the motorways, it says in the European Driving book I have that nearly every garage will sell them – maybe they do, but they weren’t selling them to us. Eventually, a few days in we found a garage that sold them but even then I had to point at the word in a book so the lady at the counter would understand me, at which she looked at me and said ‘Ohh, vignette’, pronouncing it EXACTLY the same as I had been – strange. Anyways, stress over, we now have a vignette!
First stop was a town/village called Dolni Morava which is in the mountains and the whole area is a ski resort in the winter but in the summer months they use all the slopes for outdoor activities like hiking and downhill biking. The reason we went was that we had scouted out the Skywalk – a 55m high sculpture that you can walk up and admire the view over the Morava Valley.
It’s really cool actually, cost us around £22 for the use of the ski lift to get up there and entry to the skywalk and another £1.50 for Liam to use the 18 storey toboggan slide to get back down (I nominated myself to be bag-carrier and walked down the sensible way).
We had a bit of a nightmare with the ski lift though – neither of us have ever been on one and we didn’t realise there was a barrier you had to pull down infront of yourself which meant that the man working the lift was shouting after us in Czech and even got on the loudspeaker to scream at us in a language we didn’t understand – thank god there was a couple in the seat behind us miming what to do otherwise he might even have followed us to the top to shout some more.
It was a little bit windy up there…
And we were even brave enough to sit on the netting at the top on the skywalk and look down to the floor 18 storeys below.
Next stop was Trotsky Castle – a symbol of the Bohemian Paradise! This castle was built in the 1300s on top of what was once a volcano and was notoriously difficult to invade, I can see why, the walk from the carpark was quite enough for me, never mind trying to conquer the place!
There were originally 2 towers called Baba & Panna with the habitable part of the castle built in the space between, of course it’s all ruins now but still really impressive. I much prefer ruined castles to the ones with the furniture still inside.
We’ve been free camping the last few nights but we’re heading into Prague tomorrow so that means it’s time for a REAL campsite – and a shower! 🙂
tiny van adventures 