Well, that travel itinerary is a mouthful unless you are Czech! I’m not even sure how to pronounce where I started nor where I ended up, but that was my start and end points of the day. My legs were certainly better than yesterday, although I had to stop about a dozen times during the day and stretch to keep them from seizing. I think they are about 60% of normal, and I hope to get steadily better in the next couple days. I rode about 40 miles today and climbed around 2000 feet, so a bit more than yesterday.
Český Krumlov was in a lovely light when I left this morning.
I stopped at the grocery store just right next to the hostel and got some rolls and lunch meat and some fruit and off I went. The first thing I had to do was climb about 500 vertical feet out of Český Krumlov, and I was pleased that my legs held up.
I realized that my legs are really stiff too, so I stopped at least a dozen times today to do some yoga by the side of the road to try to loosen up some of those tight muscles and tendons. It made a world of difference.
I feel like I went through some rural heartland of Czech Republic. There were wide expanses of fields and cultivated land dotted with small very modest villages. The ride was lovely, with about half of it on small roads or dedicated bike paths going through the forest or right next to the river.
I was kind of surprised that the Czech Republic has such an extensive bike-only path network. I arrived to Týn nad Vltavou about 3:30 PM, and my hotel feels like a quasi Soviet style block of rooms.
But the lady who runs the place is nice, there’s a room where I can store my bike with the five or six others and I walked to a restaurant to have some dinner. I even attracted the cat at the restaurant by myself!
While I was having dinner, a little storm moved in and torrential rain came down. I had checked before I left the hotel to see what the weather forecast was and it was not supposed to rain until 11 PM, but obviously some of it came early. Luckily it was short-lived and I could walk back to my hotel when it ended and stayed dry.
Tomorrow’s forecast is for about a half inch of rain, so I’m sure it will be a rainy kind of day. In some ways that’s preferable to me to the 90° temperatures and sun we had today, climbing up some of those hills at the end of the day.
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