When we woke up this morning I proposed Prague to Ton, but she pointed out that we are running out of time. She had two more places she wants to visit so Prague was struck from the list.
Our first stop for the day was only about 40 minutes from Krumov and is another UNESCO site. Holasovice is a small farm village of about 30 homes and businesses built in the Gothic style that was common in the late 1800’s. The original villagers were German speaking, but today the village is Czech.
Driving to Holasovice had us mostly on small country roads that are impeccable . While the roads are not wide, the condition of the surface is the best we have seen anywhere. The first time we visited Czechia we swooped into Prague on a freeway from Germany, and swept out of Prague on a freeway to Wroclaw Poland so we did not experience Czech national and secondary roads.
This time we have spent quite a lot of time on national and secondary roads and Czech roads are the best we have driven on in Europe. They are not particularly wide, on par with Germany and Austria, but the condition and quality of the surface of the roads is exceptional, it makes driving very relaxing.
After spending about 45 minutes walking thru Holasovice we set off for our final destination of the day. Melnik is located about 30 kilometers north of Prague so I was dreading driving thru Prague. It turned out to be not that bad. Part of the reason is in the 2010’s the Czechs completed a 3 mile tunnel under the center of Prague. As a result thru traffic is kept off the surface freeways. It worked really well today for us.
When we arrived at the campground in Melnik there was no one in the reception, just a phone number to call. This is becoming more common. You call a phone number and they tell you what to do, and give you a window in the morning when you can go pay them. We debated whether to move on from Melnik, but our next destination was too far to tackle so we decided to stay.
After setting up we decided to walk to the center of the city. I checked google and it said it was about 1400 meters which we usually cover in about 20 minutes. I noticed that google also called out a 120 meter change in altitude which is steep. What google didn’t make clear is that 110 meters of that climb were in the last 800 meters, it was very steep and had Ton asking me why we didn’t call a taxi.
Our first stop once we successfully scaled the hill to the town center was the city museum which featured a wine shop serving local wines. The person serving us didn’t speak English, only Czech and German. She decided to speak to us in German. Instead I asked her to speak to us in Czech since we weren’t German and it would be a good chance to learn Czech. I could see she appreciated that, and while I didn’t learn much Czech (one word) it made for a fun experience.
We enjoyed the wine and one of them impressed Ton so much that we bought a bottle of it. But we had come here to see the place where the Vltava River enters the Elbe River. Melnik was originally established as a Castle to guard that critical point.
We walked around Melnik for nearly an hour and Ton was enjoying taking a lot of pictures which is a sign she is enjoying herself. At the end she said she was glad we stayed in Melnik and that the climb was not that bad.
