The first miles…
Even the longest trip starts with the first step – says an old Chinese saying. So it was that Peter, Kalman and I left my place in Vienna with our fully packed bikes for the nearby train station and soon we were sitting on a very crowded train to Gmuend in Lower Austria, close to the Czech border.
We had some vague ideas of where and when we wanted to be: we had the somewhat ambitious idea to make it all the way to Prague by the next night, just in time for the finals of the World Cup. As for me, I had a fixed ‘date’ with Anne on the island of Ruegen on the shores of the Baltic Sea in Germany the following Saturday, over 900 km’s away.
We got off on the Czech side, in Ceski Velenice and soon thereafter, started heading north on a pleasant road, with very little traffic, but a lot of smaller hills. While Kalman has had quite some experience with bikes, it was to be Peter’s first long-range experience – while it was quite taxing for him, he did remarkably well.
In a couple of hours we reached the town famous for its beer, Budweis and we enjoyed a nice lunch on the main square. Then we caught the bike route next to the longest river in the country, which the Czech call the Vltava, the Germans the Moldau, why do they have to confuse everyone by changing names? Anyhow, the locals could not be bothered about the name, being a sunny Saturday afternoon, the entire town was outside running, biking, kayaking, canoeing, playing golf, climbing – it was a real beehive.
You have to know that I am not too passionate about bike roads – it is not the proximity of the cars that I am looking for, but you see a lot more of the towns, the road signs – and the regular roads run a lot more direct. Well, Kalman and Peter convinced me to make an exception and along we went on the curving bike path.
Later in the afternoon, after the road made a large circle around Temelin, the Czech atomic reactor oh-so-close to the Austrian border, we had a gigantic incline to climb – which led us to a small village. Seeing a small square with lots of picnic tables, we decided to rest for a bit – the only problem was that we were low on all supplies and no shops were in sight. Then I saw a nice small house with a large open window and in no time I was chatting with the owner, a nice lady, who was kind enough to share three nicely cooled Czech beers with us. What a treat that was!
Just after the town on Tyn we started yet another long climb when Peter firmly told us he had had enough for the day and we found a nice camping site, where we rented a wooden hut. They had a band singing American country songs in Czech and we got a nice hamburger and a few glasses of beers.
It was a nice first day for a journey.