urban bicycle journeys

Our destination this new day would be the town of Telc, a little less than fifty kilometers away. Telc was billed as one of the most intact medieval town squares in Czechia. Before the rain started, the cycling this day was delightful; forests, small towns, almost no car traffic.

It rained for the latter third of the day’s bike ride. We got wet and cold. There was no alternative but to keep going, really. In the rain we came upon a town called Krahulci, just six kilometers before Telc. It was Saturday afternoon and a roadside restaurant was full of families. The only open tables were outside under umbrellas, providing only partial protection from the rain. We sat down anyway. Beer, hot soup, and brown bread really hit the spot.

It was raining on and off when we cycled the further half hour on a rural highway into the medieval town of Telc (population 5,100.)

A musical performance in the main square had been going on but had been interrupted by the rain and they had moved it to under the overhang. Is this Czech folk music or something specific or something else? I do not know. Ten second video.

It was a Saturday afternoon. There were lots of tourists in Telc and hotels were nearly full. We ended up getting rooms in separate hotels. Lyman stayed here.

We had a nice outdoor meal that evening. At least in restaurants, Czech food is all about meat, gravy, and some kind of starch. Vegetables are mostly nonexistent. The Czechs serve several types of starch that translate into the English word dumpling. One is yeast bread dough that has been boiled instead of baked. In restaurants they slice it up, artfully arrange it on the plate, and you sop up your gravy with it.

You wash it down with beer. Czech beer is delicious but almost all of it seems to be the pilsner type. The exotic craft beer varieties including IPAs that are the rage in America might be available somewhere in Czechia but we did not see it. The Czech bartenders always put a big “head” in their pour.

The next morning we left Telc. It is a fascinating old town but both of us felt kind of “meh” about it, we had preferred other towns that had more sights or fewer tourists.

We cycled down the route plotted that morning on Mapy.cz, heading north. We needed to be back in Prague in two days. We saw many other cyclists on this trip. There were not as many sleek road bikes as in America, hardly any urban commuters in street clothes, but many touring cyclists hauling heavy gear and a lot of people in cycle clothing riding mountain bikes.

It was Sunday and many restaurants are closed. Looking for a rest stop in the late morning, we found a coffee bar open in the sleepy-looking town of Trest, current population 5,600, about the same it was in the year 1870. From Wikipedia:

Třešť was originally a small parish village on the crossroads of two trade routes. Since its establishment, the Jewish community has been in Třešť. ^[2]

Třešť was known for crafts and in the 19th century for its industry. The production of furniture and matches was established and textile and engineering industry flourish. The industrial boom was the work of Jewish entrepreneurs. The Jewish community declined in the first half of the 20th century, and disappeared as a result of the Holocaust.^[2]

A young woman made us two oat milk lattes, artfully arranged on a platter, in real china cups with small glasses of water. We sat out front.

Back on the bicycles, several miles past Trest we passed a fairly large sausage factory with a fascinating logo.

We stayed that evening in the non-touristy blue collar looking town of Humpolec. We pulled into town mid-afternoon.

Looking for somewhere to get a drink we first considered something called Sport Bar.

All their outdoor seats were taken so we decided just to move on and check into a hotel. The front of our hotel, which faces the town square, looks very East Bloc, I guess it is pre-1990.

The hotel turned out to have a nice outdoor patio in the back. We had beer and dinner there.

Once again, dinner was quite delicious, two variations of meat, gravy, and dumplings.

One of us was given a side of saeurkraut, (a vegetable!), as well as two kinds of dumplings.

Our destination the next day was the town of Kutná Hora, one of the three towns listed by most guides as the most picturesque in central Czechia, along with Cesky Krumlov and Telc, both of which we had already visited. Much of our ride was through forests, intersected by villages.

The Czech language remained incomprehensible. I had been in Czechia by now two weeks and I still struggled to remember only two phrases: “dobry den” for good day, and “dekuji” (pronounced day-quee) for thank you.

The town names on the highway seemed plucked from gibberish.

This sign warned me not to do something, or to do something, urgently. I have no idea what.

On arriving into the outskirts of the Kutna Hora area we saw a spot of modernist residential.

Kutna Hora was supposed to be lovely but we first went to Sedlec, another town center only three kilometers to the northeast of central Kutna Hora. We went there because of the Sedlec Ossuary, one of the weirdest and most popular attractions in all of Czechia, a famous medieval church filled with the bones of about 50,000 people from the Black Death in the 1300’s. Many of the bones were rearranged in the 1870’s in a totally creepy way. As it remains an active Catholic Church we were told not to take photos even thought we had to pay eight dollars admission and the chapel was filled with tourists. This photo is from the internet.

Sedlec looked the working class town but it still had a medieval cathedral which dates from around 1300 and has been updated constantly. It sits next door to a huge Phillip Morris owned tobacco factor and there was some kind of tobacco museum right next door to the cathedral The smell of roasted tobacco was in the air as we entered the church.

The cathedral was in the process of renovation and had little inside. On the third floor there was a modern art exhibit, weird stuff hanging from the rafters. I bought Tootie a modern art coffee cup in the gift shop.

We then bicycled the half hour to the main attraction here, the medieval town center of Kutna Hora. Although the town has a lot of tourists I really liked its style.

After dinner we walked up a hill from the medieval downtown of Kutna Hora to another huge cathedralesque church, the Church of St. Barbara with its flying buttresses, begun in 1388 and finished in 1905. It was financed by centuries of income from local silver mines.

Prague was only seventy-one kilometers further. On cycling away from Kutna Hora the next morning we could see the church back off in the distance.

Like we had for several days we had surreptitiously each made a sandwich at the breakfast buffet of our hotel and taken (stolen?) the sandwich and a piece of fruit with us, for a picnic lunch on the road. The first time I did it I felt guilty but I got over it.

We cycled through the Czech countryside.

We ate our lunch on the bench of a central square park in a town called Kourim.

We had cycled all over Czechia the previous nine days and had not been killed or run over by a car. We had heard from various sources that because of car traffic, cycling the final kilometers into central Prague from the east were difficult. We decided to take a commuter train the final twenty something kilometers from the town Ricany to Prague Main Station. We could wheel the bicycles right on the train.

The train only took half an hour and we then bicycled another half hour to Kristi and Alex’s apartment in the Nove Mesti neighborhood of Prague. Alex was not there but we had a nice dinner with Kristi and she and Alex’s five year old daughter Eleanor Claire. Both of us stayed in their apartment that night. I had to get up at 5;00 AM to go to the airport. I was flying back to North Carolina.