Ambition Backfires

After the previous day, we were ready to get out of the city a bit.  The only question left was either to go to Kutna Hora or Karlstejn.  While Kutna Hora sounded like a nice little town with some cool attractions (a silver mine and the "bone church," which is a church whose interior is decorated with human bones) we decided to go to Karlsetjn which is a small town that has a "real" medieval castle.  Apparently this is the one that the king actually stayed in.  We also decided to avoid the standard group tour and our extra day from our rail passes to get out there.  That way we could save some money and not be on someone else's schedule.

Getting to the train station was easy, and geting on our train was easy as well.  It was even easy getting from the train to the little town and up to the castle gate (the key here was remembering the Czech word for castle.  It's Hrad).  The only issue here was the gate was closed!!!!  This sucked.  We should have figured something was amiss because the entire path up (and a steep long path up too!) was fairly empty of people and most shops were closed.  After being rejected by the gate, we found a local inhabitant of the town, and she told us that the casle was closed today.  I guess that would have been one reason to have gone with the group tour.  because they probably would have know that :)  Oh well.  I actually have no regrets on the day trip.  It was fun geting out of the city a bit and seeing some rural parts of the Czech Republic.  All in all pretty refreshing.

On our way back into town we figured we take a nap once we got to the hotel.  Instead of catching up on sleep, I convinced Kirstyn to get a beer in the lunge and to try a hooka with me.  Both were very good and set us up for our much deserved nap.  However, I put on the Hangover on and neither of us got a wink of sleep.  It was still relaxing enough to get us to muster up enough energy to meet up with Fregly and Christina for our last night out in Prague. 

Our thought was to grab something in Old Town and maybe hit up a jazz club after.  Kirstyn had a couple dinner recommendations from the Prague Top Ten book that Nick and Gabrielle were nice enough to leave with us (and has been very useful overall.. thanks guys!).  We had a bit of trouble tracking those places down on the small winding streets and just ended up trying a random Italian place along the way.  It had outdoor seating and looked reasonably priced.  Normally the outdoor seating at night would have turned us off because it was getting quite chilly, but the outdoor area had heaters and blankets at each of the chairs.  This made for a pleasant dinner, but the service was awful.  We wanted to get a bottle of wine after dinner to hang out a bit, but by the time the waiter finally came back we decided to just call it a night and even skip the jazz club too.

Once back at our hotel, Kirstyn and I opted to have a final glass of wine in the lounge before heading off to bed.