Neither of us slept well. Despite gorgeously light duvets and pillows made of down, the beds were unexpectedly soft, and a number of people came back late at night and very noisily managed to get into their rooms. This is the nicest place we have stayed in in the whole trip, though still a very reasonable price.
We were well awake before the alarm went at 7.15am so started to get up. Our plan for today was to visit the Skoda factory at Mlada Boleslav, about 1¼ hours out of Prague by train. We had checked all the relevant websites and knew we had to get the 9.25am express train.
A nice surprise when we revved up the laptop to find we had a written offer for the bach on the West Coast. It was a very cheeky offer, but we know the potential buyers are getting a formal valuation done on Monday so we hope a more realistic offer will come after that. They seem very keen anyway, which is great news. Skyped with Suzy and Tim to discuss the offer.
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| Mlada Boleslav, outside Skoda factory |
Downstairs to a tasty breakfast and then hotfooted it to the train station. Caught our train with no problem and had a relaxing ride to Mlada Boleslav, where we immediately jumped on the next train which took us on a 10minute ride around the outskirts of the city to deposit us right outside the Skoda factory. All good so far, and the promised rain had held off.
Walked up to the ticket counter at the Skoda factory to get sorted for a factory tour, given the website says there are daily tours, and no word that this does not include Sat and Sun. Alas, we soon found out it tours don’t run on weekends. Ordinarily we would have taken the trip to Skoda next Mon or Tues, but the website said the factory was closed for a short period over Mon to Wed next week. What bad luck. It just wasn’t to be. We could still have a look around the Skoda museum, but John found this very disappointing and expected there to be at least double the number of cars on display. Thankfully our trip was redeemed somewhat by the concept cars for the Yeti and the Roomster being on display. We are pretty interested in getting a Skoda Yeti sometime in the future, if we go down to one car instead of two.
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| Skoda Yeti and Roomster concept cars |
We were all done at the Skoda site by 12.30pm (after expecting to be there a good part of the day) so decided to catch the next train back, scheduled for 1.24pm. One of the websites said it was a pleasant 20min walk back through the centre of town to the station so we set off. We found the centre of town, with some lovely sculptures but ended up taking a very convoluted route back to the station, and after a very fast 40min walk arrived there with just a little time to spare. Back to Prague by 3pm, a quick shop for groceries for dinner and back for a quiet remainder of the afternoon and evening.
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| Main square, Mlada Boleslav |
The forecast for the rest of the week is pretty cool temperatures and wet so our sightseeing around Prague might be a wet affair over the next few days. The summer weather has been pretty poor for us. We’ve only had a couple of really hot dry days, but a great number of cloudy and rain-threatening ones. Two years ago we had only a couple of damp days the entire 3 months. This time we’ve had entire weeks of them.
