Day 1 - Sokolov to Kolova Haje. A day of challenges.

My son Eric would drive us to the start of the ride in Sokolov, about 2 hours. So we loaded up the bikes and set off at 8 AM.


An uneventful drive … but the first Challenge of the day.


NO BATTERY. The batteries for Mirek and Hanka’s bikes were inadvertently left in Prague! Sadness for sure. Two hours each way to get them. How could we salvage the day?


Ideas were thrown out (in Czech and English with Eric in the middle), a few calls made, and we had a plan!

  1. the batteries would be ferried by a bus driver (I suspect a few favors were called in for that) from Prague to a town near our penzion.
  2. Eric would take the two batteryless bikes to the bus station where they hopefully would arrive.
  3. And using Mapy.cz I would find my way to our lodgings.

I had a great ride and even managed to meet E, M, and H part way in the small village of Loket - it means elbow - and describes the village location because of how the river flows around it. (Some of the Bond movie Casino Royale was filmed there.) 

Challenge #2. The Penzion.


I arrived alone and the door was locked. Called eric who called Hanka who called the inn keeper who arrived and quite dourly informed me (using gestures and some German which I vaguely remembered from high school) that we had no reservations. Back to the iPhone and WhatsApp to call Hanka. I put here on the phone with the inn keeper and in the end I got a key. How did we ever travel without smart phones?

Challenge #3 - afternoon monsoon.

The weather forecast for the week was sunny and dry 60 at night and 80s in the day. But as I was bringing in my gear it started. We are in a mountainous area and it was a typical Rocky Mountain gusher complete with thunder.

I missed it, but Hanka and Mirek, who were still on the from the bus station after getting the batteries were not so lucky and got soaked.

Dinner soon. Enough Challenges for today.

Until tomorrow. Dick The Biker Guy.

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