April 18th; From Munich to Prague with a Stop in Nuremberg

We had our wake up call at 6:30 a.m., breakfast at 7:00, and were on the Autobahn by 8:00 heading north to Nuremberg. Although south of Munich the Bavarian countryside becomes quite mountainous, on our way north it consisted mostly of rolling, wooded hills and cultivated valleys. Many of the small towns and villages nestled in the clefts of the hills were quite picturesque, but of course being on a bus tour we could not stop off and check them out more carefully. The central part of each village was often a nice church, although sometimes they were also situated on a small hillock beside the town.

In Nuremberg the bus circled around the city wall, which was amazingly intact, and cut in to the central square to drop us off. We were given an hour and a half to see the town, which was not nearly enough, so we decided to hit the high point, literally. We started marching steadily uphill toward the castle on the top of a small, rocky hill on one edge of the old city, and after about 20 minutes of modestly strenuous exercise we arrived at the castle gates.

The view of Nuremberg from the castle was fantastic. We decided to pay the admission fee so that we could climb up to the top of the old tower for an even better view. It was well worth it although the climb to the top required 113 steps according to a schoolboy coming down who had apparently counted them. The openings at the top of the tower were barred, probably for safety reasons, but we still had great views for almost 360 degrees. Better yet, the openings between the bars were just large enough that I could poke the lens of the camera through them and take some nice pictures of the castle and the city spread out below it. We saw two graceful cathedrals and a stately Rathaus or city hall from our perch in the tower, and the panoramic view of the neat, tiled roofs of the houses really made a fetching scene.

There is a castle museum for which you can also buy a ticket, but knowing how long I take in museums Monika decided to not risk letting me into it. Apparently the museum collection included a muzzle-loading forerunner of the Gatling gun dating from the 1600s, and probably other oddities that I can only guess at. Instead of the museum we opted to see the "deep well" that was dug to provide a reliable water source for the castle during sieges. Even though it was a "deep" subject, we figured it could be covered in the 15 minutes we had available!

Inside the wellhouse we were told that the 55-meter deep well was laboriously chiseled through solid rock over a period of 10 years. The well was still usable, but the water level was so far below us that it took about 5 seconds for something dropped from the top to hit the surface. The guide lowered a set of candles on a wire down to the bottom, and watching a yellowish glow light the rough hewn rock walls down in the inky blackness far below us was decidedly eerie.

But by then our time was up and we had to hustle back down the hill to catch our bus. Monika snagged some Broetchen with 3 small sausages on them for us to snack on and I ran into a small grocery store on one side of the main square to buy two bottles of water. The "Aqua" brand water turned out to be lightly flavored with citrus juices and very lightly sweetened with fructose, and we both liked it a lot, much better than a soda. We were not allowed to eat on the bus, so we wolfed down the Broetchen sitting outside the door and just finished in time to board at 11:30.

From Nuremberg we headed basically east into the Czech Republic. The border crossing was a non-event; the border guards didn't even bother to come aboard the bus to check our passports much less check to be sure we had medical insurance to cover us, which we had been told would happen by a Cosmos representative. I wondered if anything would change when we crossed the border, and really the only thing that changed was the lettering on the street signs, which now started using the little caret and accent symbols in addition to the usual letters. It was not, however, the Cyrillic alphabet, so I could still puzzle out at least the names of towns, and that's all you really need to do to drive. The street signs were all the international standard signs used all over Europe and everyone still drove on the right side of the road, so I judged that driving in the Czech Republic would not be that much different than other European Union countries.

The landscape also continued to look like the small farms and villages of Bavaria. The hills were, however, noticeably lower than in Bavaria and they seemed to flatten out even more as we drove a couple of hours to the western edge of Prague. The large towns such as Pilsner had a noticeable amount of industry, and our guide informed us that the Skoda brand of cars was manufactured there at a factory employing 40,000 workers. We finally fetched up for the day at the Hotel Elizza about 15 miles west of the center of Prague, and that was basically it for the day. I worked on the journal until it was time for our dinner at the hotel, and afterwards we just relaxed for the rest of the evening.