Monday, August 15, 2005

Cesky Krumlov, Czech Republic - DAY TWO





















We woke up fairly early, sat on the balcony overlooking the river while enjoying our FREE coffee, and then made breakfast. After breakfast we packed up our stuff and headed off to see the palace. Now..... many of the buildings in this town look like they have fancy brickwork and great carvings but..... alot of it is just painted to look that way. You'll see this in some of the photos. It's pretty wacky and sneaky.
The palace has bear pits (Yes, you read correctly) where they have two bears. This used to protect the palace back in the day but now is just a novelty for us tourists. Once inside the gates you can look down over the town. What a lovely little town it is! We walked around the palace and then made our way to the palace gardens. Spectacular! We wandered for a couple of hours, stopping for a drink, and then made our way back down to town. It was time to attempt some canoeing. (Now, I wasn't too sure about this as the waterfalls/rapids looked scary to me as soon as I pictured myself going over them so I was a bit weary of doing this). Luke and I hired a canoe (Inflatable) and headed into the river. At first it was Ok, but I quickly learned that I was not very good at canoeing..... especially with Luke. We argued the whole way ("Paddle on your left!" "No! Paddle on your right!" "You're not steering properly!" "YOU'RE the one that's not steering properly!", etc...) I'm sure most of you can picture it.... Well, we made it over the first set of rapids/waterfall just fine, which made us feel a bit better but there was a part of the ride that Luke and I had to stop at to carry the canoe across land to get to another part of the river. Well, THAT was HELL. We missed the stop (Which is conveniently located in the middle of some rapids) and had to pull the canoe over on the other side of the river, portage back to before the rapids, get our shit together and attempt to hop out on the other side without being pulled down through the rapids. At this point I was feeling less than confident and Luke and I are not really canoe enthusiasts, but we climbed back in the canoe (After some arguing back and forth about how we were going to do this) and went for it... It went PERFECTLY. Couldn't have gone better. We shocked the shit out of ourselves. All that debating and arguing for nothing (As it usually is)! We portaged to the other part of the river and hopped in.... we were heading to the scary part now.... the larger fall where there is a small section walled off on the left side where you are supposed to go down cause the middle and the right are too crazy. Well, we paddled VERY SLOWLY to make sure that we aimed correctly and hit the left side. "Are we doing this? We could get out and walk if you want!" Luke yelled. "Ah, fuck it, let's do it!" I yelled back. "Oh Geez, we're gonna tip. God damn canoe. I HATE this". I thought to myself. And..... we did it... Again. We still had some time left to use the canoe at this point but I was nervous and quite a chicken so we headed in after making the one round. We were good at the rapids but not too good at the basic paddling in a straight line. We're both so damn stubborn (No shit, right?!) that we couldn't decide who was paddling incorrectly so we figured getting out of the canoe would be the best idea. Luke looks back on this little adventure fondly but all I remember is thinking "Get me the hell outta this canoe.... We have no idea what we're doing!".
After that we were pretty soaked so we sat outside in the sun to read and have a beer for a while to dry off. After a while Luke took a nap and I took a walk around the outside of town, in the more residential districts and took some photos. Afterwards I woke Luke up and we went out for dinner. Ribs and chicken wings and salad. I ate the salad but the rest left much to be desired and was a HUGE portion. Luke stuffed as much as he could into himself but we ended up taking to huge slabs of ribs home to keep in the fridge for Luke to make sandwiches with later. Once the sun went down Luke and I went out again to take some night shots and a long walk. At around 10:00pm we headed back to the hostel to enjoy some beer and play cards (Luke kicked my ass again) and then hit the sack. We were off to Vienna in the morning.

2 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

This is great Jessie. I just spent the last hour reading all about your trip - didn't have internet at the cottage. I am so jealous and I miss you guys more than you could possibly imagine. Your photos are beautiful...keep it coming...I have something to look forward to every day.
XOXO!
Kïrsten

10:14 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

You guys are taking great pictures, it looks so beautiful there.
Miss you
Emily

6:53 PM  

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