Our Last Location

(I am sitting here at 10PM in front of a giant Apple store in the center of Munich - the only place I am aware of in town with a free wifi connection, and it's blazingly fast, too. Bless you, Apple)

The little rural Czech town of Cesky Krumlov has a train station with service that ultimately leads to cities in every direction. Oddly, though, the station is a 30-minute walk from the town center. Also, the service requires you to begin by taking local trains that travel slowly and stop at every nearby town. The end result of all this is that most people avoid taking the train to or from there. So many area hotels and local entrepreneurs have started up shuttle bus businesses that will drive people to the major cities within a few hours drive or the 90-minute drive to Linz, Austria where you can catch a fast train to just about anywhere. That is what we did.

Our Czech shuttle-bus driver was having a bad morning. He actually called our hostel where he was supposed to pick us up at the front door, to tell us he would be two hours late. When we told him we would miss our train if he was, he grumbled and said he would be there shortly. He was, but he was clearly unhappy about it. A while later he calmed down enough to tell us what his troubles were and the ride became more pleasant. In short, a combination of vehicle troubles and mis-schedules had made him want to make one less road trip that day, but he did it anyway when he found out our timing was critical.

After about an hour we crossed the border into Austria. We saw the now-defunct border crossing stations and our driver joked that the roads were already better, the houses larger and “we sometimes say even the weather is nicer” when you cross the border. He had a point. The Czech Republic (as well as the other formerly-Communist-controlled countries) have done remarkably well in just 20 years of freedom, but you don’t have to look hard to find rough areas. It was immediately clear after crossing the border into Austria that there was more money to spend on personal property and public infrastructure.

Our train trip from Linz to Munich was very pleasant (on an amazingly smooth and quiet modern train) and we arrived by 3PM, found our hotel quickly, and checked in. I then asked the family “Do you want to rest here for a while, or do you want to go out and have a look around”? The answer was a pretty emphatic “Rest”. You can tell we are near the end of our trip and the tolerance level for the typical sights is wearing thin. Almost everyone napped and we didn’t get out until 6PM. Not much accomplished today except changing locations and getting some rest, but that’s okay at this point. The top photo is of the children playing games at the communal table in our funky hostel in Cesky Krumlov. The bottom photo is of the town hall in Munich with it's famous glockenspiel in the center.

Tomorrow we have our only full day in Munich and I think it’s going to be another warm one. We may keep things pretty low key then, too. We didn’t plan anything, knowing that we would want the flexibility to do only whatever we had the energy for. We’ll see what happens…