urban bicycle journeys

The breakfast at Art Hotel in Pisek was typically Czech good. There was granola, yogurt, and chocolate chunks. A coffee machine made all kinds of cappuccinos. We were each given a small glass bottle of orange juice and the croissants were fresh.

We packed up the bicycles, but before leaving town we had to make one stop, at a music store that opened at 9:00 AM. I had initially brought my cheap ukulele on this trip, the one that I had bought three years ago at a dingy music store on Baronne Street in New Orleans. I had somehow broken it in half on the flight over to Prague, trying too hard to fit it into the overhead bin.

A friendly store in central Pisek had quite a selection of ukuleles and I took a shining to one of the cheaper ones, costing only the equivalent of forty-something dollars and they accepted credit cards. It came with a gig bag and I strapped it all to the back of my bicycle. I like to stop in the middle of nowhere and sing a song, and Lyman is one of the rare people on earth who really like to hear me play.

We headed out into the Czech countryside, this time towards the larger city of Ceske Budejovice, fifty something kilometers to the south. Using a route plotted by the app Mapy.cz we again cycled through a combination of dense woods, farmland, and small villages.

Many of the routes plotted by the Mapycz app followed a series of small yellow government issued signs marking various bicycle routes. For one short section the bicycle path deteriorated into hardly a path at all, and we had no choice but to messily single track cycle through the woods.

The trail eventually led us to this gentle highway through farm fields.

The final five or ten kilometers into Ceske Budejovice were along the channelized Vltava River. Many of the Czech bike paths near urban areas were heavily used, crowded with cyclists and pedestrians, even small children and strollers. Europeans seem to have a much higher tolerance for close passing than Americans. Here it was like motoring on a heavily travelled two highway.

Ceske Budejovice (population 95,000) is the home of Budweiser beer! Sort of. Seemingly not commonly talked about is that many Czech places have names in German as well as Czech. Ceske (“city”) Budejovice translated into German is Budweis, so Budweiser in German means “of Budweis.” The Czech Budweiser brewery is headquartered in Ceske Budejovice. German immigrants in St. Louis MO USA appropriated this name way back in 1876 and for an almost one hundred fifty years there have been and continue to be ongoing agreements, fights, negotiations, and court battles. Generally, Budweiser beer sold in Continental Europe is the Czech version. American Budweiser in Europe is currently only supposed to use the name Bud. We saw cases of Czech Budweiser all over this part of Czechia.

The medieval central square of Ceske Budejovice is lovely. We found a table on the street to have a Budweiser, Czech version.

The Czechs seem to love statuary on their buildings.

Dinner that night was at one of better Czech restaurants of the entire trip. It was not fancy but patrons were eating instead of just drinking beer. There were lots of families.

A regal looking woman of a certain age in white pants sat down by herself and ordered something neither of us could stomach, a “salad” of pyramidically shaped gelatinous stuff that in America we might call head cheese, a large quantity of cold fatty meat in all its glory. She tastefully ate every bit of it, with a beer. We were impressed with her style. I snuck this photo.

I ordered pork tenderloin in gravy with dumplings; Lyman had goulash with a side of bread. I learned on this trip that ” goulash” in this culture just means “stew.”

The sun still had not set at 9:45 PM when we walked around after dinner.