Up at 6am, made some rolls for lunch for everyone, said goodbye to AJ (who had another hour’s stuff to do on the computer) and off to catch the 7.30am tram into Freiburg’s main bus station. Our bus pulled in at 8.25 and we were off by 8.30am. Plenty of passengers sleeping on board so no idea how far it had already come. Our trip to Plzen was going to take 9 hours.
Promptly fell asleep/dozed for a few hours, with a 10min stop coming at 11am on the outskirts of Stuttgart, though no food or drink on tap. Stuttgart is obviously heavily involved in the car business, as we passed huge complexes for a number of the major manufacturers, especially BMW and Mercedes. Our second 10min stop (and only other stop) was at 2pm in Nuremburg, where refreshments were available. Thankfully we had taken our own food and water on board. We dozed quite a lot on the trip (well, I did anyway - K) and the trip went very smoothly and surprisingly quickly.
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| Lovely architecture in Pilsen |
We crossed the border into the Czech Republic by travelling under a building with a long overhanging roof and that was it. The countryside is hugely developed for cropping, especially wheat and corn. Into Plzen half an hour early. J had already booked a place for us to stay for our 3 nights in Plzen, something we don’t usually do but it just seems so much easier at this point in our trip, and also with the weather getting so much hotter it is not much fun lugging big packs around as we hunt for accommodation. Also it is pretty much high season now. Only a short walk from the bus station to our hotel. It’s pretty basic but clean, tidy and not far from the historic city centre, plus breakfast is included.
Our first impressions of Plzen are quite mixed. We anticipated it would look a lot less neat and smart as Germany, and certainly Switzerland, but it looks exceedingly tired and lacking much love and attention from the little we have seen so far. Not surprising I guess given its chequered history. We are looking forward wandering around the city centre tomorrow. We might just happen to check out the Pilsen beer manufacturing plant while we are there. We expected coffees here to cost a lot less than Germany (we haven’t had one for 4 days) but an espresso appears to still cost around NZD$2.30. On the up side, 0.5l of beer costs less than 0.25l of water, i.e. about NZD$2.
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| Impossible dinner menu! |
We dumped our gear in our hotel and set out at about 7pm to find an easy meal and have an early night. We found a nice place just around the corner. It was obviously heavily favoured by the locals because we took one of the last tables. The menu was totally incomprehensible to us but thankfully the waitress spoke some English. We basically ordered chicken steaks with salads, and a beer. It was very nice and one of the best meals out we have had for while (though we have eaten out very little on the trip really). We might go back there in a few nights’ time as we have 3 nights here in Plzen. Managed an earlyish night for the first time in about a week. Unfortunately, even though we have TV here, we have yet again been gazumped by not having access to the sports channels and are still missing the Wimbledon tennis champs.
It was very hot again today. We passed one temp board in Stuttgart that read 35.9 deg. Spending the entire day inside an air-conditioned bus was rather pleasant!
