Rocks.

People often ask Meredith how we decided to go to Czechia this summer. When Mer turned forty, she told me she wanted to go to all the countries of Europe, but I could pick the country each year. So, when people ask her about why Czechia, she defers to me. It’s because of the rocks.

When I was poking around the Internet looking at the offerings of different countries, I stumbled across pictures of Czechia’s national parks, and one in particular was appealing – the Cesky Raj, or “Bohemian Paradise” in English. It is close to Prague, and not too huge (so everything is close together), and it has the Prachovske Skaly – Prachov Rocks: stunning, huge columns of rock thrust into the air. If it were not enough just to see them, you can climb them (if adventurous), or climb up and through them on rock stairs jammed between gigantic monoliths of stone. I clearly needed to see these, and that is why we are in Czechia.

The Bohemian Paradise did not disappoint. We started with the Prachov Rocks this morning, which are only about five miles from Jicin. We started our hike a little after ten, and it would be after two o’clock before I decided we should move on, and there were still a few trails we left unexplored.

After paying the modest admission fee (about four dollars each), we walked up a slight incline in wooded terrain. We turned the corner and saw our first stone tower, and I was in awe. And it turns out that it was an isolated one and not especially large. As we walked on, more and more columns came into view, and it felt like something out of Lord of the Rings. We walked into a horseshoe-shaped collection of stone, and it was unlike anything I have ever seen.

And then I saw stairs. Leading into the rocks. And thus began the theme of the day – climbing. The Prachov Rocks are pretty amazing at any angle, so getting to see them from the ground, from more or less inside them, and from the top of them is a pretty great day. We found five viewpoints, with my linguistically astute wife figuring out the word for “viewpoint” partway through the day. Some views were mostly of the rocks, and some were of the rocks and of the surrounding countryside. Spectacular.

The only downside to the tromping around was my slight neglect in not having tried to obtain a trail map. There are multiple trails, all well marked with color-coded blazes, but I did not know where each trail led. Oddly, the park did not bother to align with my mental map and guesses, so there was a long hike around the top that resulted in some serious backtracking, keeping in mind that up-and-down progress was usually involved. My wife stayed in good humor anyway; she is a gem. She even was okay with my finding a rock staircase near the parking lot on our way to take a break, and it turned out to be a long and very steep staircase. It let us out at a beautiful vista (yay!), and then the trail dumped us back to where we had been thirty minutes before (boo!). I may have gone down to go up to go down again. Ooops.

Finally, around two o’clock, I decided that my legs were tired and that I wanted to go to another site, so we left the rocks behind, at least for now. We headed the few miles over to the ruins of Trosky Castle, which is the symbol of the park – two towers sitting on columns of rock, all by themselves and visible for miles around.

While we were able to drive to a parking lot below the castle, there was still a fair amount of “up” involved. Once we got to the gate and paid our entry fee (again, who is going to quibble after climbing for a third of a mile?), we went up to the gates, where we could climb…up… into either of the towers. We picked the higher climb to the bigger lower tower (the higher tower is not accessible; you can only get to an observation tower/platform a little ways below it) for no other reason other than there were no people walking that way at the time. It was a long way up.

Mer said late in the day that she can give little better praise to a place where she had to climb than, “It was worth it!” The big tower gave magnificent views of the surrounding area, even to some distant mountains on the edge of haze. The biggest “window,” which was almost certainly a collapsed section of wall or maybe a door, gave direct views of the smaller and higher tower on the other pillar of rock. The two towers used to be connected by the living quarters of the owner, but now only some walls remain between the two. The drawings of the full castle we saw were very pretty.

We lingered in the big tower, and then went down and then up into the observation tower at the foot of the little tower. Similar results – great views of the land and of the bigger tower. Also, more stairs.

We finally made our way back to the car, and I drove us off to the last stop of the day – a series of three lakes our host had said were very romantic. It would be an easy walk in a pretty place, and Mer would love it and me. A great win. And then we pulled up to the RV campsite. Odd. And the man who took our parking fee said there was no trail around the lake, but we could walk over to the other campsite on the very small lake. Hmmmm. This was not the romantic late afternoon I was imagining. But! He did say the other campsite connected to the trail that would take us back to the rocks. I could still salvage this!

By going up, of course. And up. And up. And as we crested the hill, where I had hoped to see the Prachov Rocks…was a parking lot. We had come to the far side of the rocks area, a site we had passed in the car that morning, and the rocks were still a one-mile walk (probably up) away. I turned us around and walked back to the car. The slightly good parts were that the trail was pretty, through tall and straight evergreen trees, and also that Mer found the whole thing funny. Funnier going down, but still funny.

We got back into Jicin around six o’clock, and we grabbed some take-out pizza to eat in the beautiful courtyard of our hotel. We finished the day by walking the remainder of the pedestrian part of the town (that we hadn’t seen yesterday), and we took time to eat some ice cream in a small square near the clock tower. And it was all on level ground.

We have two hard-and-fast rules when we are traveling in Europe – you will waste time, and you will waste money. Sometimes things do not go as expected, and you have to swing with it. One of the little joys we have had while traveling has been to go to English-speaking church services on Sundays when it is possible; it requires us to be in-country on a Sunday and to be in a big enough city to support a church that speaks English. Prague qualifies as both, so we found a church near our hostel that had a service at 10:30, and we dutifully arrived at 10:00 to find the doors of the building locked. Since the church met in a commercial building on one of the floors, we thought we might need to buzz in, but we could not find a buzzer. We stood there for a few minutes before we went to a cafe to get on the internet (and have a muffin).

I brought up the church website, and under the worship section it mentioned they now meet at 4:00 pm. Huh. I know I didn’t make up that 10:30 am time out of nowhere. Mer asked to see the computer, and she went to the church homepage, where it said, “Change in worship time June 23rd – 10:30 am”, which I took to mean, “Starting June 23rd, we will be meeting at 10:30, for summer hours.” It turns out they meant, “On June 23rd only, we are worshiping at 10:30 am.” I’m not sure why the June 23rd notice was still online on July 14th, but it meant we missed church – we were too late to get to any of the other services on time, so we went back to the hostel. It was about eighty-five minutes of wasted effort, but you will waste time when traveling.

We headed out to the airport to pick up the rental car. Prague is an amazing city, and we did not see anywhere near enough of it, so I am happy we will be back at the end of the trip for a day. We did the tram-subway-subway-bus trip out to the airport, where we picked up our bright green Skoda Fabia, which is the same make of car we had on our Croatia trip three years ago. Skoda is a Czech company, so we are playing to the hometown team.

My brilliant idea, with which I was very pleased, was to get the car out at the airport (as opposed to in the city) so that I could avoid city driving while getting used to a strange car, and a manual shift one at that. I also brought along our GPS with the additional map on it, which promptly told me to take a right. To the city center. Sigh. I’m not sure where the Hertz office is in the city, but at least the route I did take did not take me too far into downtown before getting me back on a highway.

We had an uneventful two-hour drive to our next destination, the town of Jicin, population sixteen thousand. Although that is a bigger number than I would have guessed, the main part of the town where our hotel is located is very small and walkable. We got checked in to the hotel by a very nice clerk who said we were the first Americans he himself had ever checked in. He had a preference for sixties and seventies American rock music, so we did not mind the check-in process at all while we listened to his playlist.

Once settled, we popped next door to a cafe for a snack, based solely on the fact the cafe sign had a cat logo, and there were painted cat paw prints showing the way to the door. We also ran into the first people with whom we’ve interacted in Czechia who spoke no English. Happily, there was one other customer there, and she spoke English, so she helped us, although we did end up with two orders of an excellent hot chocolate instead of one. I did not mind.

We wandered the center of the town, which is very cute, with colorful buildings and a tower. I saw people walking around up at the top of the tower, so I decided we should do that. I think it cost about $2.50 to go up – it’s not all bad being out of Prague. Near the top of the stairs, the tower opened up to a room which was filled with puppets who seemed to be performing for a king puppet. It was a little odd, as there was no explanation, which we could not have read anyway.

At the top, we paid the admission fee; the clever locals let you climb up to the top before charging you. Are you going to say no at that point? The views from the top were excellent, or so Meredith tells me. I was terrified of the height, and it was all I could do to make it around the perimeter of the tower and take a few photos of Mer before retreating back to the safety of inside the tower, where I happily looked out over the landscape through a window. It was excellent. Mer stayed out for two full circuits of the tower.

We had been told of a tree-lined alley that we could walk along that ended at a loggia (huge covered porch) that had been built by Waldstein of the Waldstein gardens and palace in Prague. It seems as if he built this and several castles around in the area. So we walked out. And walked. And walked. It turns out the path was about 1.3 miles long, but it did end in the loggia. As we approached, we heard music being played, so we popped up onto the porch to investigate, and there was a small Renaissance-style band playing, with a lute, and recorders, and a cello, and even a hand-pumped organ. We sat and listened to the free concert for about thirty minutes; it was completely unexpected. Just like the huge wind storm that blew in with driving rain. When we were over a mile and a half from our coats and umbrellas. So we waited the rain out, admiring the double rainbow that was produced, and then as I proclaimed we could just about go, we got a boom of thunder and some more rain, but mostly on the town side of the loggia. It was a very tight cloud, it seems. The rain finally stopped, and we headed back to town, dry.

Once we got past the tower, I wanted to see a small park to the left, so we went that way. As we got into the park, we heard music, so we delayed supper and went to investigate. It turned out to be a woman singing with her small guitar band. She was singing Irish songs that we knew, in Czech-accented lyrics, with (presumably) explanations to the audience as to what the songs were about. Probably. Did I mention we don’t speak Czech? We listened for two and a half songs, and then she wrapped up – we had caught the end of the concert, but it still was a delight.

After supper at an Italian restaurant, we went back to the hotel. We missed church and did not miss the city center, but we also stumbled into two unlooked-for concerts. Sometimes things do not go as expected, and that can be a very good thing.

Touring Europe allows you to see great art, history, architecture; experience new cultures and try new foods; hear new music and speak new languages; gain a greater understanding of the human condition. Then you hand the guidebook over to Matthew….

Today was the first day of the Czechia trip on which I was in charge of what we got to do; Mer and I split up vacation days so that we each take turns planning things (or winging things, in my case). My first day on the job was made happily harder in that it was supposed to rain, and it didn’t (other than a brief shower as we walked from a tram stop to a church). Good problem to have, but it required some midday modifications to the itinerary, which had been indoor-intensive.

We took a new (to us) tram to the Little Quarter, which is the area right below the castle. As we got off the tram, it started to rain, so we headed for the Church of St. Nicholas to tour the inside out of the weather. It was on my rainy-day list anyway, and it was a good stop. The inside of the church is as Baroque as I have seen anywhere. The Baroque era was (roughly) from 1600 to 1750, and involved elaborate, over-the-top decorations. In the case of St. Nicholas, it meant almost every surface was covered with decoration – it was almost hard to take in. My brochure from the church had a great line in it that made us laugh out loud, even as we tried to be quiet in a church – “The elemental lack of restraint in the individual elements is typical of the architect.” Quite so.

We looked around the church for a time and discovered we could go up to the gallery, where we could see the higher decorations more easily, as well as ten large paintings from the life of Christ. Mer loved the viewpoint, but I could not get near the edge to see things well. As we were about to leave, I asked the man at the door if the crypt was open. He looked confused and asked if I knew German. Since I did not, I left, much to the disappointment of Mer, who wanted to see me mime “crypt.”

By this time, it had stopped raining, so we walked down toward the river, going down and under the Charles Bridge, onto Kampa Island, which is full of shops and restaurants and is quite pretty once you get away from the bridge area, and it even includes a large working waterwheel. As we were walking through the park on the island, we heard marching band music – a full band arrangement of the pop song “Happy.” Of course, we had to investigate. It turned out to be the Copenhagen Show Band, touring around and playing in the park today. They did not march, but they did have a few dancers, and the band was very active in playing (swaying or waving instruments around), and they seemed to be having a great time. We stayed until they stopped playing, which was about ten minutes (which included a Disney-movie medley). It was a “happy” stroke of travel luck to stumble on them.

We headed over to the river to get yet another perspective on the city, and we noticed the river lock guide was decorated by a dozen yellow light-up penguins. As one has, of course. We struck up a friendly conversation with an older couple from Scotland, and the husband had been in the United States a few times, including Maine. He said he had the best blueberry pie he had ever had there. That pleased me very much – a little hometown pride.

From Kampa, we walked toward the castle hill, with my having the idea to take the funicular up the hill to save walking. But there was a huge line for the ride, so instead we went to look at the Monument to Victims of Communism. It is made of a series of statues on stairs; men who get progressively thinner and lose limbs as they get higher up the stairs, until there is nothing left. It is well done.

After lunch, we walked and took a tram up to the Wallenstein Garden and Palace. Wallenstein was a man who made a ton of money in the Thirty Years’ War in the 1600s, and he build this huge estate where the Czech Senate now meets. The grounds are open for free, and today part of the palace was as well. There are fountains and shrub-lined paths, and peacocks roam freely. There is a large artificial grotto wall that is kind of creepy looking with dripping rock formations, and an owlery. The palace main hall is huge, only topped in size by the Prague Palace hall, and it is now used for concerts and lectures. A few other rooms were open as well, but the hall was the main showpiece.

We used the subway to get back to Wenceslas Square, where we headed toward the Mucha Museum. As we got close, of course I veered into the Senses Museum instead. The museum is small, but fun, full of displays that trick your senses and mess with your head, including a spinning tunnel that makes you think a stationary walkway is moving, and a forced-perspective room that makes one of you look much bigger than normal. It was a good time, if not exactly high-brow culture.

When we came out, the day continued to be nice, so I improvised and took the subway back to the gardens area, where we then walked and walked and walked over the river and past the Charles Bridge and all the way over close to the National Theater. Later, Mer gently pointed out that we took the subway to a far point to walk back to a point that was only about ten minutes from where we had started. Oooops.

But we did get on the Vltava River. We rented a paddleboat for an hour, and we circled Strelecky Ostrov island and then sat quietly on the river looking at the Charles Bridge and surrounding area. We do like to see cities from the water when we can, even if it involves some unnecessary walking.

Having learned my lesson, we walked back the direct way, grabbing supper along the way. We got back to the square around 7:30, in time to buy tickets for the 8:00 showing of Srnec Theater’s black light show. Black light shows are a Prague art form in which black lights are used to highlight props that are then “magically” moved about by stagehands dressed in black. The founder of the Srnec Theater came up with the idea in the 1960s, and the show tonight was comprised of a series of ten-minute long skits involving lots of things floating and flying. There was a western-based one with a trotting horse, and a magician causing things to zoom about, and a woman hanging laundry that moved, and a fish that became a mermaid and back again, and other shows. It was brilliant fun – the skits were clever and funny, and the illusion was almost perfect (you could occasionally see a black-covered hand or arm if it got too close to the normal light). It may not have been the ballet, but it was a great time all the same.

We headed back home for the evening having put in our last full day in Prague for this trip. Tomorrow we head out into the rest of the country, which will hopefully be a different kind of museum of the senses.

We in the United States do not have a great sense of long history; it has not sunk down and become part of who we are. We celebrate historic buildings built in 1901 and put up “History happened here!” signs celebrating the dedication of a “History happened here!” sign in 1965, and these are fine – I find them interesting.

Then you hit Europe. Where the oldest operating synagogue in all of Europe, built around 1290, is known as (really), “the Old New Synagogue.” Since there was an even older synagogue around when the newer one was built, it became the New Synagogue. Then, after a few hundred years, it became the Old New Synagogue. When your “new” synagogue is over seven hundred years old, you have some history behind you.

After a too-early wake-up alarm around 7:15 am, on day two of jet lag, we had breakfast and then went to the old city, to the old Jewish quarter, where we met up with a Jewish tour guide and three other Americans for a three-plus-hour walk through the remains of the Jewish neighborhood of Prague.

I say “what remains” because in the 1860s, Jews were granted full citizenship rights by the Austro-Hungarian Empire as a larger part of concessions to minority groups to help quell rebellions. Since Jews were no longer required to live in a segregated neighborhood, the wealthy families moved out into the larger city, leaving the area to the Jewish poor, and later the poor in general. By 1900, the area was a slum, and the city razed most of it to make way for new buildings. They did leave a few synagogues and the old Jewish cemetery behind, as well as a few other important buildings.

We started at the Old New Synagogue, which is an Orthodox congregation. That means, in part, that women are segregated from the men who sit in a rectangle around the cantor who chants the service. The women watch and listen through small windows in the interior walls. I was surprised at how small the main room is – about the size of a large school classroom. It is also a reminder of how much time has passed that to get into the synagogue, you need to go down four or five steps; the synagogue was build at street level, meaning that the surrounding area has been built up that much over seven hundred years. And yet as recently as 2002, the building and environs were flooded by the Vltava River up to three or four feet deep.

We next visited Maisel Synagogue, which is no longer an active place of worship, but instead is a museum that tells the story of Jews in the Czech region. Many of the objects were given to the Prague Jewish community for safekeeping ahead of serious persecution during World War II. There was an excellent computer-animated movie of how the old Jewish quarter looked in the 1880s; a librarian made an accurate 3-D paper model of the city of Prague at the time, and remarkably, the model still survives, and became the basis for this short film.

We went on to Pinkas Synagogue, which is also no longer active. Instead, it has been turned into a very moving memorial to the almost eighty thousand Czech Jews who were murdered in camps by the Nazis. The name of every known victim is neatly handwritten on the walls of the building, while recorded voices quietly read the names of the dead over speakers. In addition, there was a small room filled with artwork drawn by children at a holding camp called Terezin. The children were allowed to have an art class, and some of the teachers hid the work safely away. It is hard to imagine the life the children led that brought them to draw things like being thrown out of school, or drawing a hanging of a Jewish man, or drawing pictures of the trains that took people away. It was at this synagogue that we learned that the Nazis required local Jewish leaders to pick which Jews would be rounded up; the Nazis asked for a certain number, and then the local council had to provide that many Jews. It was chillingly cruel.

Pinkas exits though the old Jewish cemetery from around 1400 to1700. There are something like twelve thousand headstones, but an estimated forty thousand people are buried there, as people were buried on top of older graves because of space constraints. Somehow, this cemetery was left alone by both the Nazis and the Communists.

The last synagogue we visited was Klausen Synagogue, which now houses a museum explaining Jewish holidays and traditions. I know a fair amount about Jewish holidays and customs from the Bible, but there are a lot of extra-Biblical traditions that exist. For instance, I had no idea there was a “Days of Sorrow” centered on remembering the destroyed temple from 70 AD and the one before that in 570 BC. It would be an interesting place to visit when we have more time someday.

We finished the now-almost-four-hour tour by walking to a statue commemorating Franz Kafka, and then on to seeing the outside of the Spanish Synagogue, which is under renovation for almost two years. Our guide showed us pictures from inside, and it is beautiful – heavily decorated in the Moorish style of geometrical shapes with bright colors.

The tour was very good, and our guide was very patient with all of our questions. It was a morning well spent, even on only a few hours’ sleep.

Since it was almost 2:00, we walked over to near the Charles Bridge, where we had lunch in a small coffee shop. Refreshed by food and rest, we walked back to the bridge, where we climbed the tower on the Old Town side of the bridge. It is a solid climb up about 150 stairs, but the views of the old town, the bridge, and Prague Castle were all worth it. In addition, I’m usually terrified of heights, but the windows that looked out from the ramparts were high enough that I felt safe.

The forecast had called for rain all day today, but we had only been rained on for short periods during our walking tour. It began to rain as we crossed the bridge to the castle-side tower, where we climbed up that one as well. That tower was much less crowded than the twin across the bridge; I’m not sure if it was because of the rain or because the crowds seem to hang out on the Old Town side of the bridge. Either way, it made for a pleasant viewing platform, even in the light rain. We retreated inside the tower for a few minutes when I saw some nearby lightning, but that passed, so we went back outside.

We walked back across the bridge and headed back into the Old Town. It rained hard for a few minutes along the way, but then stopped for the rest of the evening. Having a total of about twenty minutes of rain in a whole day of touring was a real blessing when we thought it was going to rain all day.

We jumped on the number 22 tram to take a scenic ride up to the castle area. Sitting while touring was a welcome change. We got off near the top of the hill to wander in a quiet neighborhood area, where we only saw four or five people, none of whom seemed to be tourists.

We took the same tram back to the center, where we ate a quick meal at a sandwich shop on the main shopping drag. It was not quaint, but it was getting late, and it seemed like a good idea to get back to our hostel to try to get a full night’s sleep – I’m in charge tomorrow, and of course I only have vague ideas of what we might do. I’ll need to sleep on it.

In the past, I have left as early as twelve hours before a flight was scheduled to take off – five hours to get to Toronto, three hours before an international flight, and then I left four hours of “squishy” time for traffic, food stops, border crossing, etc. After getting to the airport ridiculously early several times, I tried to aim for eleven hours, but we left late, so we actually left ten hours before takeoff. We skipped food (because of the early evening flight, we were just going to have lunch in the airport), breezed through the border, and hit no real traffic. As such, we were sitting at the gate three full hours before the flight took off. Which was then delayed twenty minutes. Meredith is pushing for nine hours for the next Toronto-based trip. She likes to live wildly.

The flight was uneventful, but the trip from the airport to our hostel was not so easy. Mer waited until we were waiting for the bus to tell me we needed to take the bus to a certain stop to transfer to the Metro. Fair enough. That we would take to a stop to transfer to another line. Okay. Which would take us to a stop where we would go up to street level, to catch a tram. In a city in which we had not traveled before, with signs in Czech, while jet-lagged. What could go wrong?

It actually was not too bad – we did struggle a bit with trying to figure out which direction of tram we should take, but Mer saw a famous church spire that got us fixed on the map, and we headed away from it toward our hostel. Never mind that it turned out to be the wrong church – it still worked. We also wandered a bit on the far end trying to find the right street, but it all worked out so that we were checking in around 9:30 am. Sadly, our room would not be ready until 3:00ish, so we stored our bags and headed out to explore the city – the jet-lag-breaking nap would have to wait.

We were smart enough to buy three-day passes for all public transportation in Prague, so the tram-to-metro and metro-to-tram riding we did all day was easy to do. We went down to the Old Town, where Mer took me on the start of a Rick Steves walk, starting in Wenceslas Square, which has a museum on one end, and the other end leads further into the Old Town. We ambled though the square in a little bit of a fuzzy-brained fog, but it was exciting to be in a new city (for me – Mer, of course, had been here for a couple days in the 1990s).

We went down a narrow and cool (if commercial) street that ended in a huge square where the Old Town Hall sits on one side and Tyn Church on the other. It is a really beautiful space, with pretty buildings, open space, and a huge monument to a priest who tried to reform the church in the 1400s – Jan Hus. He was excommunicated and then burned at the stake for trying to do so, but he has been a symbol of Czech independence ever since (even as they were dominated by the Habsburgs of the Austro-Hungarian Empire).

The Old Town Hall has a complex and cool clock from the 1400s that tells the time, the zodiac, the amount of daylight, the time of sunrise, and so on. Of course, it is so complicated, I could not figure out how even to read it as a clock. But, on the hour, it gives a small automated performance before sounding the hour, to hundreds of camera-toting tourists. First, Death turns over his hourglass and starts ringing a small bell. Then, two windows open up, and the Twelve Apostles appear at each window. Finally, a rooster crows, and the windows close, and then the hour chimes. It is a remarkable clock, despite seemingly not impressing the teen boy behind us who was being ribbed by his family for having a “we waited ten minutes for THAT?” attitude. He was smiling as they gave him grief. I liked the clock.

It was about noon, so we took the Metro to a quiet neighborhood for lunch. It was a little out of the way, but Mer wanted a quiet lunch away from tourist hordes, and it was lovely. We ate outside next to a small round “square” bordered by five-story apartments.

Back to the main square, we did more of the Rick Steves walk, passing through Ungelt Sqaure (where merchants once stored wares, since there were only two entrances), then peeked into a highly decorated Baroque church which was sadly closed, but had provided windows to look though. We wandered down to the Fruit Market Square, which was fairly small and cozy, and past the Estates Theater that now seems to focus on Mozart operas, and finally ended up at the Powder Tower, which used to be the main gate in the city walls. It is beautiful and imposing.

Next to the Powder Tower is one of the most magnificent buildings I have ever seen – the Municipal House. It is a fabulously decorated homage to Art Nouveau. Art Nouveau was a celebration of new techniques of construction that allowed the architects to incorporate elaborate curved designs into iron decorations and stained glass and tile work and mosaics. The Municipal House is pleasingly decorated inside and out with art everywhere. It is a grand building, and I loved it.

We had managed to get to the early afternoon, so we headed back to the hostel, getting there about 2:30. After an initial protestation from the new desk clerk that we were too early, the original clerk explained things to him and he let us have our keys so we could finally go get a three-hour nap, followed by a shower. We both felt much better after that.

We had supper in the same neighborhood as where we had lunch, in a small beer garden. There may have been a German tourist or two, but we did not hear anyone speaking in English. So, another quiet meal.

We finished the evening off by strolling though the now-lit city to the Charles Bridge, build by Charles IV of the Holy Roman Empire in the 1300s. The bridge is beautiful itself, and the Vltava River is pretty to look at, but on top of all of that, it overlooks the Prague Castle, started by Charles, and it’s one of the largest castles in the world. At the center of the complex is the striking St. Vitus Cathedral. It is a remarkable spot, even if we had to share with hundreds of other tourists.

As an aside, this bridge is shown in Spiderman – Far from Home, and I was able to identify where that scene was shot, which was very cool. But the movie shows the bridge empty of people. I’m here to tell you that is never the case on a good-weather evening; even a quick shower of rain did not dampen the spirits of the crowds on the bridge and in the small square.

We walked the full length of the bridge and back, and then headed home. Mer had figured out which stop to use on the tram to get us really close to the hostel. The only issue is that the tram going TO the city stops there, but the tram coming FROM the city does not. We discovered this the hard way, overshooting our stop by about a mile or so. We decided to wait for the return tram, but it was a little creepy on a deserted bridge in the dark.

And so, having clearly become masters of Prague’s transit system, we wrapped up day one.

The last full fay of our London adventure this time around resulted in the five of us breaking into three parties. Shelby went to Greenwich to see the Fan Museum and explore Greenwich itself, while Neuf and Brianna went to Buckingham Palace to (somewhat) see the changing of the guard – it was crowded, so they did not see very well. They visited some stores as well. All three of them met up early in the afternoon at St. Paul’s, where we were all to rendezvous at 3:15.

Meanwhile, to help make up for the lack of supper last night, I took Meredith to a breakfast buffet. With a view. Darwin’s is a restaurant that is part of the Sky Garden, which is a real garden at the top of the 20 Fenchurch Street building (nicknamed “The Walkie Talkie). The garden is on the thirty-seventhish floor (depending on if you are using the American or British floor numbering system), and the restaurant looks right down on the Thames, with great views of Tower Bridge.

Normally, I can’t stand heights. But I thought I would try it this time, since I knew Mer would love it. It turned out to be great – we were in a restaurant, sitting at a window, which overlooked a larger lounge space about two stories below.  Though the glassed-in lounge space had an outdoor terrace, the terrace wasn’t directly below us.  So I was quite removed from the edge and could not see straight down. The food was expensive – about thirty to thirty-five dollars each for the buffet – but the service was top-notch, the food was excellent, and it was serving as two meals for us. Since it costs even more than that to go up to the observation deck of London’s highest building (the Shard), getting to sit for an hour while eating excellent food was a solid deal.

After brunch, we wandered around the garden, which is free to the public with reservations made online. Since the reservations limit the number of people allowed up at one time, the garden did not feel overcrowded, and the layout allowed us to look out in all directions. Mer wanted to try the terrace, and I tried it, but had to beat a hasty retreat from the height. It was a slow-paced and pleasant morning.

We regrouped at the apartment and then headed out to the St. Paul’s area. We wanted to explore St. Bartholomew the Great, a church of which we had seen the exterior during the walk the other night. It is London’s oldest church, from about 1145. We had a little trouble finding it since I was relying on memory of the walk and on maps in my head, but we did get there eventually. The church was almost empty, and we got to walk around it at our own pace. There were several modern religious artworks installed next to inscriptions from 1600, and they were moving – there was a modern statue of St. Bart holding his own skin (he was flayed alive), an abstract but identifiable crucifixion, a modern painting take on Mary and Jesus, an excellent terra cotta statue of Jesus coming out of an old stone coffin for his resurrection, and some glass work. The church has been the site of several movies, including Four Weddings and a Funeral, Richard II, and even, so we were told, a scene from one of the Transformer movies.

We left St. Bart’s to get back to St. Paul’s, stopping briefly at a park that had been planted where a Wren-designed church used to be. It had been bombed out during World War II, and the altar wall still survives, along with some window casings down the sides. The interior of the church has been planted with plants in a way to show where the pews used to be. It is a lovely use of the space.

We had lunch just outside of St. Paul’s, and then we met the others there at 3:15, so we could start our trek out to the Warner Brothers Studio just outside of London, to go see the Harry Potter Studio Tour. It took a good two hours to get there from St. Paul’s, party because we happened to take a train that stopped frequently. But get there we did, and it was pretty amazing.

Warner Brothers has dedicated two former studio buildings to provide  permanent housing for props and costumes and sets from all eight of the Harry Potter movies. They have exhibits on how things were designed, and full sets of rooms, such as Dumbledore’s office and Harry’s bedroom at Hogwarts. These are the actual sets that were used in the films. We got to hear, from the people who actually made things, about how sets were constructed, or how special effects were done. To my great surprise, the effects people preferred to use real props as much as possible, resorting to computer-generated effects only as cost or safety demanded. Even then, they usually tried to have some real props as a base from which to start, so, for example, Harry might be fighting a snake with a real prop head and a computer body. It was great fun to get to see how they did it.

By sheer luck, we were there on the first day of the preview opening of the Gringott’s Bank set – the staff themselves only saw it for the first time last night. It was the entire Gringott’s lobby, in full scale – huge. It was pretty jaw-dropping. They also had behind-the-scenes looks at how the vaults were made for the films – again, a mixture of real props and computer animation.

The exhibit had a full-sized section of Diagon Alley, and a near-full-sized Platform 9 3/4, with the Hogwart’s Express sitting in it. The winner of the tour was saved for last, with an incredibly detailed scale model of Hogwarts itself – it must have been fifty feet across, and had several levels and included lots of landscaping. It is hard to do it justice from description, but it was a real “Whoa!” moment.

We took the faster train back to the city, and so our touring for this trip ends. Tomorrow we get launched at 7:00 am (3:00 am EST), and should get home sometime around 9:00 pm if all goes well. We have had a wonderful time with great weather and good success at seeing lots of things.

Shelby decided to do her own thing today, but the rest of us got a leisurely start to the day, eating breakfast at Covent Garden before heading to Paddington Station, from which we took the one-hour train ride to Oxford, home to the oldest university in England. Meredith had lived a summer there with her parents when she was seven (almost forty years ago), and had not been back since a brief visit when she was fourteen and on a tour that stopped in Oxford for a couple hours. The other three of us had never been, so it seemed like a great getaway from the bustle of London. And so it was.

We got there about noon and walked about a mile from the train station to the university area. The university is broken up into thirty-eight separate colleges, and we were hoping to see the ones with which the authors C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien and Lewis Carroll were associated. Since that represents three different colleges, that was an ambitious plan. We got to Carroll’s college, Christchurch, which is tourable by the public, but for some reason, the main hall was closed until 2:30, so we kept walking along a small river (the Cherwell) to the local botanic gardens.

I like botanic gardens, and it was a beautiful day, so we paid the reasonable six pounds and spent a happy hour there, wandering around and looking at flowers and trees. We were probably about two or three weeks early for maximum early blooms, but it was a soothing place, even with many small school children running around near the entrance. We found that Carroll used to walk with the young Alice in the gardens, so we even had our Carroll tie-in.

We then decided we should get lunch, and the plan for that was another mile walk across town to the pub favored by Lewis, Tolkien, and the other Inklings – The Eagle and Child. Once we were most of the way there, I discovered I had left my glasses back in the gardens (I was wearing my sunglasses), so I walked back by myself to get them. I met the others near the pub; they had been window shopping, so had not yet reached it.

The front section of The Eagle and Child is crammed with nooks and is interesting and inviting. As such, there were no tables there. The back half is more modern – not bad, but not so interesting. We sat there and had an unhurried lunch. Meredith had been denied admission to the pub thirty-nine years ago, for being too young, so the lunch date had been postponed for some time.

What to do after lunch? When you don’t know what to do, punt. We walked a mile back across town, to the River Cherwell, where we rented a punt – a shallow boat that is propelled by a pole by someone (me) standing in the back of the boat. I had seen it on TV, and was reassured by the man collecting the money that it was very easy. It was not, at least not for the first fifteen minutes, during which time I ran into a bridge support and the shore, had to have a boat coming at me go around me because I could not get on the correct side, and got so close to a footbridge I had to stop the punt by reaching up with my hand and grabbing the bridge. I also almost fell in four times. Happily, I more or less got the hang of it for the final forty-five minutes, which was good, since that was a much busier section of river, which included three not-well-controlled punters and a very erratic rowboat using the novel method of rowing with the prow facing the wrong direction. Overall, the punting was a good experience, and the others said they liked it, but I was tired and my feet were sore, so I was happy to be back on land, dry.

As we walked back along the street, we saw that Magdalen College was open, so we paid for admission there. It was quite lovely. It was very quiet and had a wonderful path along some wooded areas near the river. The flowers were out back there too, and it was peaceful. We had to be back through the main gate to the college by 6:00 or risk getting locked out in the paths, so we made sure not to be out too long, but we got to walk around the quads of the college, and spent some time watching the deer in the deer paddock, because what is a college without its own deer population?

We stopped at a coffee and pastry shop after I was seduced by the display in the window. That worked out okay since we then walked back to the train, took the train back to Paddington, and took the Tube home. We got back to the apartment around 9:00, so the pastries inadvertently turned out to be supper.

As for Shelby, she made the most of the day, going to Westminster Abbey (and stumbling into an anti-Brexit rally), the Foundling Museum, the Sir John Soanes Museum (it was open this time), and riding the London Eye. And she still beat us home.

Today was the first day I planned; years ago Meredith decided I needed to plan half the vacation days rather than letting her plan them all and then making tons of suggestions when we got to the country. That is fair, but it is more pressure when others are involved. I played it really safe today – we just went to the Tower of London.

In my mind, the Tower is the one must-see sight in London. You have a cool castle, a thousand years of history, and the super-cool Tower Bridge in the background of many pictures. There are the crown jewels, and Beefeater guides in costumes, and semi-tame ravens wandering around. There is prisoner graffiti that is four hundred years old and escape stories and Isaac Newton as the head of the English Mint at the Tower. It is an amazing place.

We showed up when it opened at 9:00, having purchased tickets the night before. We stayed until almost 3:00, so it seems as if the others enjoyed it. We started with seeing the crown jewels, since that can get long lines. We waltzed right in to them and got to pass them (on moving walkways) three times. I had forgotten how impressive they are – covered in diamonds and other valuable stones, they do convey a certain awe, even to this skeptical American.

From there, we took a forty-five-minute tour from a Beefeater (warder) – one of the people who served in the military for twenty-five years or more and then applied for the position. Our guide was a funny man who managed to be cranky-seeming while still being polite. My favorite line was when he told Americans “to go study your history. That won’t take long.” He was great. He filled us in on the development of the Tower, from the original White Tower from around 1100 to its use as a royal residence and a prison and a barracks (not all at the same time).

We then saw the rest of the Tower (more or less) over the next several hours. There are exhibits on animals kept at the Tower (they rarely fared well), the armor and weapons of the keep, the Royal Mint (which was at the Tower until 1811), retired crowns and jewels, and more. We finished our visit to the Tower by crossing over the famous Tower Bridge, going out along it and coming back over.

At that point, Shelby headed off on her own to explore the St. Paul’s Cathedral area, to see the Museum of London (mixed reviews), and to see the British Library (positive reviews). The other four of us returned to the apartment. I took a nap, and Brianna rested in her bedroom, and Meredith and Neuf went up to Covent Garden for awhile before we all headed out to St. Paul’s at 5:30.

We grabbed a quick supper across from the cathedral, and then we met up with a local guide, Andrew, who was to take us on a two-hour walk of the original City of London (about one square mile), with a focus on Shakespeare and Dickens. The City itself is mostly banks, and so while 350,000 people work there, only about 7,000 live in the district, which makes it very quiet at night. Andrew walked us around, showing us places that Dickens describes in his stories, and pointing out where Shakespeare lived when he came to London, as well as a few memorials to Shakespeare. It was a relaxing way to see the city, and along the way, we saw a few houses and churches that date from Shakespeare’s time or earlier, along with some memorials to the religious upheaval of the time in which Shakespeare lived. Andrew even suggested that Macbeth might be inspired by the Catholic/Protestant issues of the day, with a Scottish king (James) on the throne and with other hints (like the castle porter’s speech about a farmer and equivocator being found in hell – both could be a reference to a well-known Jesuit priest executed around 1606). I loved the tour, and the others were still speaking to me at the end, so that seemed positive.

We walked down the hill from St. Paul’s to get the magnificent view of the church lit up at night, and then grabbed the Tube back to the apartment from near the river. After a day spent in the 1100s, the 1600s, and the 1800s, it was nice to ride back home.

Sometimes on these city trips, we stretch the city out. In this case, we stretched it by a ninety-plus-minute bus ride to go see some rocks. It’s amazing what people will pay to see.

All of us got up early and were on a bus, heading west at 8:30 am, going to see Stonehenge. A not-insignificant part of the trip was in just getting out of London to the highway. London is huge. The countryside out to the stones is very pretty in a non-dramatic way, with lots of fields and pastures. The bus drove right by the monument, so my first sight of the place was through a bus window. I had not realized how big the stones were. We zoomed on by, to the visitor center, getting off the bus about 10:30 with strict orders to be back by 12:30. The stone circle is a little over a mile from the parking lot, and there is a shuttlebus, but Mer and Brianna and I decided to walk on such a beautiful morning. In the interest of time, we did take the bus back, but the walk out was soothing. Shelby and Neuf took the bus out, so they were there for some time before we showed up.

I had not realized that the area around Stonehenge is full of burial mounds – hundreds of them within just a few miles of the stones. The stones were added roughly five thousand years ago to an area that seems to have been important from before that time (there are some mile-long dug trenches still visible that predate the stones being erected). Stonehenge is also the only existing stone circle that has stones on top, called lintels. Many of the stones are over ten tons, and they were all hauled from at least several miles away, with some seeming to have come all the way from Wales. A lot of people put a lot of effort into the construction, and no one really knows why. The stones do line up with the sun on the winter and summer solstices, but we do not know if that was the main function, as a sort of calendar.

Anyway, it is very impressive and worth seeing, even with a nearly four-hour drive round trip. You can’t get into the stone circle, but you do get to walk all the way around it, and you can get quite close on one side. There were a ton of people around, but the site is so large that you can get alone pretty easily. In fact, if we had been there with a car, I could have easily spent another three hours wandering around the burial mounds and checking out all of the visitor center. As it was, two hours pretty much covered the walk out to the monument, the actual visit, and the shuttle back to the tour bus. We got there with about five minutes to spare.

When we got back to London, Mer wanted to get a quick bite to eat an an Italian restaurant and then head over to the Docklands area of London to do a walking tour out of her guide book. Brianna, Neuf, and Shelby decided to go see a small museum and poke around some shops in that area instead. That worked for us – the Docklands is not high on the list of what to see in London for most people, but we stayed out there back in 2009 when we first visited London as a couple, and we wanted to go check it out again, and more thoroughly.

The Docklands used to be the world’s busiest port, but it got bombed out in World War Two, and then never recovered as the shipping industry went to container ships which could not come this far up the Thames. The area became one of the poorest in all of London, and was largely abandoned until the 1980s, when developers figured out it was cheap land. Now it is all gleaming glass and steel and parks and fountains, and is home to most of the high-tech office workers and banks in London. It has a very “city of the future” feel to it, which we had remembered from our 2009 stay.

What was new to us on this trip was getting into the small but well-planned parks. The designers put the shopping areas underground, and then put parks on top of them with fountains, flowers, and green spaces. They are great parks – small, but inviting. It must be working – we saw real estate advertised, and a 517-square-foot one-bedroom apartment was listed for the equivalent of about $600,000. I have no idea who lives in these places. Not teachers.

We enjoyed our walk around, and then took a fast boat back up the Thames to the Embankment dock. As such, we got to sail past all of the Docklands and see the new apartments on the river, and then go under Tower Bridge and past the Tower of London. We zipped past St. Paul’s, and all the way back to near our home for the week, where we stopped in and got reorganized before heading to Chinatown for supper and then ice cream for dessert.

I don’t usually try to eavesdrop, but the Chinese place had communal tables, and the man and woman next to me were talking though the whole meal. The man got to telling the woman many of the major stories of the Jewish Scriptures (Old Testament), and he did an excellent job. I have no idea why he was so familiar with them, and I did not know how to ask, since we had not spoken to each other during supper. Then, in the ice cream store, two men came in, and one was talking in a British accent about the New England Patriots and one of their players. It was a little surreal.

It was a fine evening, so Mer and I walked back home, getting slightly lost several times, which resulted in wandering into different parts of Chinatown three different times. All part of the fun. We made it back home eventually. The others are not home yet, so I do not know how their afternoon and evening went. More eventfully than ours, it seems. I’ll update when I know more.

….

The others rolled in about 10:00 pm last night, and had a great time exploring most of London, it seems, although they had a few slight frustrations. They started their time together by visiting the Sir John Soane Museum, which is the home and collection of a major architect from the late 1700’s and and early 1800’s.  It turns out it is closed on Tuesdays. They visited a Victorian custom umbrella shop nearby, and they rode London’s double-decker buses several times.They got in a visit to Herod’s, which they said was high-end and a really quirky building. They went to Hyde Park to see the Peter Pan statue (under restoration and fenced off) and the Princess Di memorial fountain (empty of water).  After the sunset, somehow they got on the back side of Kensington Palace and had great views through the lit windows into the rooms and ended up in an area where people were swiping cards to get out of the grounds; they were allowed out. They finally looked for two different London restaurants, which were closed (one was new and not open at all yet), and so finally out of fatigue and hunger ate at the nearby Pizza Hut and then came home. They had a busy afternoon – we left each other only at 2:30. We clearly need another week here so they can see all of London, because I think they would.

It is mostly a great thing to be in a country where you speak the local language. It makes touring much easier. Since it makes touring much easier, it means people can strike off on their own, which Mer and I encourage. But it does mean that people have different experiences. Such it was today. Neuf and Shelby were already gone by the time Mer and I went upstairs to go around 9:00. Brianna decided to hang with us today.

Not only did Neuf and Shelby head off on their own, but they also did not stick together for long, each going to see different things. They started together at Buckingham Palace, but then Neuf had a ticket to tour Westminster Abbey. So their days looked like:

Neuf: Neuf went from Buckingham Palace to Westminster Abbey, then back to the palace. She caught Platform 9 3/4 (of Harry Potter fame) at King’s Cross Station before heading over to the British Library. She then texted and joined Shelby at the British Museum.

Shelby: Shelby started at the palace with Neuf, then toured the Queen’s Collection – an art exhibit focusing on royal portraits of Russian and British families. She then spent the rest of the day in the British Museum, where she managed to get to every single room in the entire museum, which is really impressive. Neuf joined her toward the end of the day.

That left me and Meredith and Brianna. We headed back to Covent Garden to get breakfast. We took a detour into St. Paul’s church (not cathedral). We had intended to walk through it to get to the market area, but the gates to the main square were closed. So we were stuck in the church and churchyard, which was not a bad thing at all. The churchyard had a striking statue of the conversion of St. Paul done around 2010, with Paul looking very young and very Roman. It worked, with the sculptor catching the instant by having the horse rear and Paul fling his arm up over his eyes – it was all quite dynamic. On the far side of the church was a small brick maze that led to a portrait of the queen, so I did the maze path for fun.

St. Paul’s is known as “the actor’s church,” and the inside is filled with dedications and memorials to actors. To drive home the point, the first sign we saw inside the lobby of the church was a directional sign to Hamlet auditions. We had not prepared a monologue, so we just went into the church, which is simple and elegant inside.

After a picture stop outside the church and one of Meredith posing with a flower cart (since she is teaching Pygmalion right now at school, which takes place here), we made it to the market. Our first-choice place was closed, but we had a good breakfast in a cute restaurant across the way.

After breakfast, we jumped on the Tube, the London subway, and took it to the Victoria and Albert Museum. I knew nothing about the museum, other than that Mer had said it was eclectic. I thought it would be a small museum filled with some decorative art. Um. No. It was a ginormous huge big museum, filled with pretty much anything that had any tie-in to a decoration. They have sculptures and silver and gold and paintings and fabrics and glass and architectural models and costumes and tapestries. They have Roman things, and early Christian objects, and Islamic and Buddhist art. They have some Donatello works, and Turner and Michelangelo and Rodin. It is an incredible museum. We ended up being there until 5:00 pm.

We walked in from the Tube – the museum has its own Tube tunnel access, and we walked into one of the sculpture galleries, where I was greeted by over a dozen Rodin statues. Welcome to the Victoria and Albert Museum! We caught a free guided tour that walked us through several of the most important Medieval and Renaissance works, which mostly focused on religious objects. We got to see a sculpture of Samson killing a Philistine; it was special for only having a few contact points on the ground. We saw a few works of Mary and Jesus and saw how the style changed over the years. The tour included a couple of ornate saint bone boxes (reliquaries), including one that had been associated with St. Thomas Becket (an English bishop murdered by four knights who thought they were doing the king a favor).

After the tour, we ran into a docent who recommended a half dozen rooms to go see, including architecture, glass, sacred silver and stained glass, household and decorative silver, and the theater and performance rooms. We also saw some other rooms, like paintings, along the way.

Of what we saw, I liked the sculpture, of course, but I also loved the theater rooms. They had costumes from The Lion King musical, and a First Folio of Shakespeare. They had the original horse puppet from The War Horse, which is a show I love. There was a Fred Astaire tux and stage designs for some famous productions and more. I don’t think I had ever seen anything like it before.

Even where we had lunch was spectacular – the cafe is decorated by heavy floral wallpaper designed by a famous designer, William Morris. We had dessert sitting in a sunny enclosed square, looking at a shallow splashing pool (although no one was in it today, since it was only about fifty-five degrees out).

One of the reasons we do this colleagues-included trips is so we can get to know our fellow teachers better. Mer and I both knew that Brianna was a fun person to be around, but we had not gotten to spend a ton of time with her. Today at the museum, the tour guide was introducing a glass cup and asked if anyone in the group of about twenty people believed in fairies. Brianna’s hand shot up as she said, “I do!” That was delightful. We knew she was a cool chick. Oh – the cup was supposed to have been left behind by a king of the fairies and had been passed along in one family for hundreds of years until the museum bought it.

We left the museum about 5:00 and went back to near Covent Gardens, to do a Rick Steves guidebook walk of the Gardens area that led over to Soho and Piccadilly Circus. When we got near the market area, I saw a souvenir shop and asked if I could go in it. Shelby had been looking for a specific souvenir, so I thought I would scout it out for her. Great minds think alike, because she and Neuf were already in the shop. And so we were reunited. They and we had also noted the same pub – The White Lion – earlier in the day and considered it a potential candidate for our dinner location, so we decided to eat there. After dinner, Shelby and Neuf went home, and the three of us finished up the walk. Soho does feel very bohemian, with lots of music shops and small streets, and Piccadilly Circus feels like Times Square had a love child with a quiet Paris neighborhood – garish lit-up signs reflected in the glass and stone fronts of elegant buildings. It is the heart of the theater district, so we saw lots of shows advertised.

Tomorrow is an early day, as we’re all heading out together to go tour Stonehenge. After that, who knows where our London fancies will take all of us?