More from Vienna

To clarify yesterday's post, no, we didn't get tickets to the Euro Cup finals (but we did watch it on a giant screen in the heart of the city with mobs of crazy fans everywhere. Ridiculous!). In fact, we didn't even know when the match was until we tried to book a hostel the day before. Good luck with that. Hence the crazy scheme of sleeping in the bushes. But hey, it worked! Our panniers are safely stowed in a locker at a train station and today we are off to explore the non-soccer side of Vienna (hello, Mozart...), and try to find ourselves a hostel for tonight before we start smelling like hobos.

euro 2008, holy crap

I am on some strange kind of free internet at McDonalds in Vienna and just watched Espana win the Euro Cup. Craziness. Now we just have to ride 10 km out of town to camp on the side of the bike trail. Vienna = so worth it.

Prague and the Czech countryside

First post from the road! After a couple days in Prague (exploring the Old Town and New Town - only slightly newer than the Old Town, dated at hundreds of years old instead of a thousand-ish), we put our bikes together and packed up our gear on a grassy shore of the Vltava river. After a couple hours´ delay, we hit the road by 5 pm Tuesday. Par for the course, when it comes to Annie and me on trip. Huzzah! Off to a good start! We even managed to navigate out of Prague by dark and found a sweet spot for a campsite in a farmer´s hayfield. Tick-free? Possibly not, but no one has tick-borne encephalitis yet. Huzzah again!

The Czech countryside is ridiculously beautiful. If you ever want to bike in Europe, come to Czech. The Greenways are a huge series of roads and trails linking Prague to Vienna through rolling hills, small villages, a few bigger towns, and farms dotted throughout. The roads themselves are awesome pavement (with only a few dirt roads linking things up) and the traffic is light and bike-savvy. (Dad, I´ve even been fine without a mirror. More than fine. I´m still looking for one though, like a true safety-conscious Titus.) There are tons of local bikers but we only met our first fellow tourers today. They´re headed to our campsite tonight so we can grill them for info and stories.

One of the things I love about travelling is that every day has at least one high point and one low point, and you appreciate them more than in normal life. Here are some of ours:

Low points

• No one sells white gas. We are therefore stove-less until we find a camping store, and have had to resort to eating at restaurants or making random concoctions of uncooked things like spinach salad with tuna, curry masala, raisins, Balkan cheese and sunflower seeds. (That one was actually pretty good for the first few bites.) Nutella and stale bread also go a long way.
• We suck at speaking Czech. Luckily we´ve been getting by with sign language and our limited vocab of 'hello', 'sorry', 'please', 'thank you', 'beer', and 'where is a bike shop?'
• Today is bloody hot. Sorry, I know the weather hasn´t been great in Canada, but 32 degrees and sunny is too smoking hot to bike in right now. Maybe Tom and I WON´T head to Turkey in August, hmm? Tomorrow some thunderstorms are supposed to roll in so maybe that´ll cool things off again. Until today the weather´s been absolutely perfect.

Highlights

• We found a random festival in random town for the solstice! We rolled in at dinner, hungry and tired and unable to find a campsite. Instead, we found a massive party in the main square with live music, food stalls, and people everywhere. Klobasa for dinner, nougat for dessert, and beers for the evening and everyone was much happier. We even saw crazy fireworks from our hotel room window that night!
• Everyone here is super helpful. We had several people help us find our way out of Prague. One mountain biker dude even went out of his way to lead us to the suburbs before turning around and heading back downtown to go home. Servers and hostel staff are really friendly and some speak decent English so we feel less like tools. Plus, everyone says 'please' a million times per sentence. 'Prosim' means everything from 'What can I get you' to 'You´re welcome.'
• Beer just keeps getting cheaper.
• We found cherry trees on the side of the road! I think Annie topped her max speed to come tell us what we´d all just ridden by. We spent an hour up a tree and then feasted.
• Did I mention Czech is stunningly beautiful??

More to come, including photos. Internet is tricksy to find though, so I´ll do my best.

Back on the blogging wagon

Hello Blogspot, so nice to see you again. Didn't think I was going to blog this trip, but I hate spamming people's inboxes so here we go. However, the thing I DO love about mass emails are all the responses you get back from people, so please please please drop me a line or comment at the bottom of these posts and I will stay in touch.

First stop of the trip = London to see Pam! (and to see London - never been here before. Nope, I did not fly through London on the way to Delhi a few years back; I flew Russian Aeroflot through Moscow. Oh Aeroflot.) London is fantastic. Exploring London with Pam is even better. Here is a taste of what we've been up to...

- Tube rides and city wandering (my bike is sadly still boxed up, waiting to fly to Prague, so for now everything's by foot and Tube)
- Shopping (from discount store Primark, to window shopping on Regent St, to exploring Camden Market, to costume stores near Piccadilly Circus. And no, Piccadilly Circus is not, like I had expected, a circus. Yep, I'm naive.)
- Pints at many an English pub
- Awesome live music - Laura Marling (an 18-year-old prodigy, think Joni Mitchell meets Feist); then a wicked blues bar in Soho
- High school reunions - so many NTers in London! Hooray!
- Stroll on Hamstead Heath
- Afternoon at Hampton Court Palace - so many fancy rooms... so many fancy tapestries... head spinning....
- Tate Modern gallery
- "Fancy Dress" Party at Laura's! (AKA costume party) Theme was "anything that starts with P" so we went as Pippi Longstocking and a Pinata, i.e. "wear a crazy sombrero and throw candy at people when they hit you with a stick." Much ridiculousness.

Enjoy the photos! I'm loving this blogging thing again.