The ride...
01:46 Kasia i Przemo 1 Comments Category : Czech Republic , Poland
Our bikes took a holiday and are taking a bit rest this winter. We are actually a bit the same :). We squeezed season in Scotland like a lemon, also by bike. How many times we finished work at 10pm, came back home, took a shower, packed up our bikes and cycled towards dark, quiet night to take a ferry in the morning and go explore another Scottish island…
This time w spent just a little time in Poland. We went for a concert, we visited all our favourite places and spent a few days at home, almost everyday going to Italian restaurant for best pizza in our country…
And as we are talking about delicacies, one day Karola took us to her Korean friend from school, for amazing Korean food. As it’s not hard to guess, we just licked the plates…:)
After not even couple of weeks we decided to move ourselves to my mum into German Alps. We calculated, that less than 500km from Czech border shouldn’t take us more than 4 days. At 5.30 in the morning we entered a train and at 11.00 we’ve been in Szklarska. There we’ve seen little carriage on the station which was working as normal train – as we found later on, people use that kind of trains all around Czech – and was so charming that we decided to take that train and travel a few more stations, to Kořenov. And bikes were travelling for free, as ‘koron ne mate’, so woman just let us go without paying for it.
Thep day was sunny and beautiful – unti descent began. When downhill has finished we found ourselves in heavy mist, sky disappeared and… it just stayed like that.
We thought that we will arrive at least to Prague that day. At the end we were not even close and that was dark already. We did shopping for a dinner and we were just cycling ahead. We entered some city and were looking for a train station, still believing that we can reach Prague, where host from warmshowers was waiting for us. But we got lost completely, did couple circles around and still didn’t found that station. We’ve sent a message that there is no chance we will reach Prague and cycled further. So long as we have experience in wild camping in Asia and Scotland, inasmuch memories from wild camps in Europe are far history, at last 8 years back and are not that rich. We changed a bit too and these days we probably wouldn’t pitch a tent in the center of Warsaw again :). We just didn’t really know how to start, but we quickly found our way to the forest :).
Czech is not that easy for cycling. In general we felt that we are cycling uphill all the time. All the time. So to Prague, which we thought we’ll reach on the first day we arrived after almost two… and we decided to leave Prague by train. As we used to, we got lost again and instead of main train station we found ourselves on something like Wroclaw Psie Pole. But actually it was in the right direction, there was even train to Řevnice soon, which was exactly on our route, so we quickly jumped in and after 30 minutes we were there. We found bike shop, as Kasia’s pedal decided to don’t go anywhere else, we bought things for dinner again and cycled away in the darkness. I mean we planned that, but it became vertically steep so we a bit walked and a bit cycled. Until we found nice place for our tent.
We woke up and cycled further. After another half day and breakfast on the bust stop we crawled to Příbram. And felt a bit like taking a train again. We even felt a bit like arriving to my mum to these Alps that day, as we had cold-rainy-and-far-from-home feeling slightly. There was a train in Příbram, with a few changes, almost to German border. Why not? We just stocked cumin bread and nice cheeses for the way, dumplings for a gift and we were on the way.
After few hours we’ve been the only left in the train. We were going uphill around the mountains by little carriage, in a dark night until we finally reached, as we thought our station. Some woman was entering the train, so we decided to ask…
Kasia: excuse me, is this Lenka…??
Woman: yyy…???
Kasia: Lenka???
Woman: ……….? yes
…so we disembarked. Yes, that was our station – Lenora.
Just another night 60km to Passau and my mum is picking us up, coming over 100km for us. Well, that kind of cycling…