The Road to the North

Wasting no time, the next day we went with Misha and her Russian boyfriend Sergei to rent two cars. We certainly weren’t going to sneak up on anyone, because the cars were an identical color of bright blue with large advertising all over the vehicle giving the web address of the company and the rental rates. We were all happy to soon find ourselves in a lush green countryside, and passing by gigantic fields of corn, barley, and other crops. Our first stop was in the small town of Zelezny Brod, where my mom had a special appointment to tour a small glass bead factory. She goes wild for beads, and northern Czech lands are world-famous for the beads they produce, so it was a good match. We enjoyed walking through the town and admiring its old church on a hill, and then found a restaurant to see the different ways they could fry cheese and cook potatoes. We also enjoyed a small museum that showed old Czech scenes, and which reminded us in many ways of Puritan America. Later in the day we found a great hotel in Male Strana (Little Rock) that looked to be a peaceful and quiet stay until the German invasion. They first secured the outside balcony, then challenged our desire to sleep with loud talking and drumming well into the night, and later carried away the morning breakfast buffet.

Thus fortified with a vegetable plate and sugar water, we went to see two castles before returning to Prague. The first, I later found out, was called a Hrad, which refers to a medieval fortress, and the second, a Zamek, is more like the large mansions that came about around the time of the Renaissance. The first was really impressive. It was perched on a hill and had a very high tower (with a precarious narrow stairway) that gave views of the entire valley—perfect for spotting oncoming invaders. The second was interesting but didn’t seem to feed into that whole Lord of the Rings imagination. And after about half the tour, as we were pointed out larger-than-life portraits and leather-engraved walls, you just start thinking about at whose expense caused this monolith to be created. So, maybe there’ll be guided tours through the Bush family home after this era has passed… J

Our next day in Prague was an exhausting one, our trip having caught up with us. We did some more sightseeing and Jeff planned to leave the next day to relocate from LA to Atlanta, while the rest of us prepared for Poland, and Misha invited us to a very nice garden party with a fresh vegetarian spread that didn’t include cheese or potatoes!