Day 20 - Travel to Prague

A longer than expected travel day from Berlin to Prague...

The day before yesterday we discovered that our trip to Prague would be a long one. The summer floods of last month wreaked havoc on the rail system, not to mention the cities and villages and the people who live there. With help from the Euraid office in Berlin, we obtained our Prague Excursion Passes to cover the rail segments in the Czech Republic. And because of the damaged rail lines, caused by the floods, all travel through Dresden to Prague was re-routed through Nurnburg. So we boarded the train and settled in for a full day of travel (11.5 hours).

The trip was still enjoyable and made even more-so by a new acquaintance, Katherine, a native of Munich. She acted as a tour guide as the castles and countryside zipped by. She gave us lots of suggestions for our upcoming visit to Munich and even offered up her teen-aged son as a tour guide while we were in the city!

We arrived at the main train station in Prague well after dark. We pulled some Czech currency from an ATM and quickly discovered that the metro was totally closed due the flood damage. We grudgingly accepted a ride from an impromptu taxi service. This is not normally a risk we would take, but our luck held and the driver turned out to be an honest and very friendly guy. He took us straight to the door of our hotel. It was quite late and the key to our room was not at the reception desk of the hotel, which was closed. It had been left for us at the 24 hour reception desk of another hotel. I took some time to figure out exactly what and where we should find our key and room. But when we did, we were pleasantly surprised with a large, clean room over-looking a busy market street. We fell into bed dreaming of our adventures to come in the city of spires.