Day 28, 24 6 2014, Pisek to Pilsen
We got our navigation right today. The trick is to use the bike routes, but use TomTom as back-up guidance. Even then, on our entry into Pilsen this afternoon we missed a route marker and were dumped onto one of the main entry roads into the city. It didn’t really matter, the traffic was considerate and calm.
The riding this morning was hard. We gradually climbed 250m, but on roller-coaster roads, so we did a lot more. I find this sort of riding, with constant changes from solid uphill, to fast descent quite tiring.
The countryside is pretty, the villages less so. Some villages have managed to renovate their centres, but most have not, and there is a good deal of evidence of the communist past.
We have seen this before in the old East Germany, unused and decaying agricultural infrastructure and associated buildings. It seems that people avoid using this infrastructure, preferring to start from new, or renovate the pre-communist stuff.
From the middle of the afternoon we descended gradually, with plenty of small climbs down to Pilsen. Our ride in on one of the major roads was not attractive.
As a city, Pilsen doesn’t do it for me. A lot of work is being done around the city, but compared with other cities we have seen in the Czech Republic, it doesn’t have the panache or polish. Roz may well disagree, and I concede that this is a judgement made with about an hour’s familiarity with the city.
We have had astonishingly good value here, due to the low value of the Czech krona. We booked into a 4 star hotel here in Pilsen, and got one of their better rooms, including breakfast for $A100. We found that you could get half-board, which means dinner included for just 5E each, or around $A7. Dinner was excellent. Up to 4 courses, good food and plenty of it. Perhaps we should have gone out and checked out the local restaurants, but this deal was too good to miss.
95Km for the day, some of it hard work.
Roz says: Bohemian rhapsody in fifty shades of green and gold as we travel through the crops. Saw two deer yesterday and dined on venison! Today we saw a stork and two young on a roof top nest and we dined on pig!! Where are these pigs kept?? We have not seen a single piggery but we are served pig products for every meal!!
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