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We arrived back late last night and have spent most of the day doing washing and tidying our house.

I have updated the pictures in the gallery (here)

Friday and away from the train station Prague didn’t seem so bad really. Its definitely one of the most distinctive cities we have been in our travels. After a decent breakfast at our hotel we headed towards the Prague castle at 9am. It wasn’t long before Susan got the shopping bug and soon rather than following the tourist worm that silvers towards the castle, we examining little wooden crafts in market stalls.

The Astronomical clock was okay and we also eventually go to the castle. We also managed to get in 3 square meals mainly because food is very cheap in Prague. We can eat a two course meal and drinks for around £15 or 500 Kc.

We also hadn’t realised the Prague is the new Amsterdam If you know what I mean. But then my mum seemed to know all about this which is slightly worrying.

For our last day in Prague we spent quite a bit of time looking at Russian matrioshka nesting dolls. Again we ate quite late and ended up travelling to the airport while checki in was open… which is never a great idea when travelling with Easyjet. Everything was fine in the end though and we had a great holiday.

I’ll pick up from Salzburg where my ability to stay up a type up what we have been doing waned. This was probably something to do with the 2 town a day 6:30am starts finally getting to me.

On Tuesday 3rd of May we had a long day of travel. We were starting to feel a little tired after our previous hectic schedule. So we decided to get the 10:10am train to Linz. Regrettably we missed it by 2 minutes and had to wait an hour for the next train. We then took a slow region train to Melk and swiftly walked across town to hop on the last ferry to Kerms for the day. This ferry from Melk to Kerms was on the Danube river and allowed us to get a good look at a few castles and village along the river. The area called the Danube Valley is one of Austria’s world Heritage sites.

After arriving in Kerms we had a 2km dash with our packs to hop on the 18:02 train to Vienna. That night Susan hunted down a restaurant called Vegieasia. Susan loved her cheap tasty Asian vegetarian and the free Lychee soaked thank you drink they gave out at the end or our meal. Personally I couldn’t get over that I ordered crispy chicken, what was served to me looked like crispy chicken, smelled a little like crispy chicken but had more of a soy taste…Yuck… soy meat… is not meat at all so lets call a spade a spade. Perhaps soy rubbery white cheesy stuff is a better description.

Vienna (Wien)
Vienna was quite good. The Public transport system is excellent, we paied €5 to use all the buses, trams etc for 24 hours. The weather was a bit of a let down and we struggled as it fluctuated between rain and the sticky hot sun. Still it made a change from the boiling hot almost draining days we were experiencing in Salzburg. We had Coffee and Strudel in a 1950’s theme café and spent the day perusing the city.

In the late afternoon we went to the Museum of Music where you can learn all about the Vienna orchestra which holds a very popular New Year’s concert. We also played with all the multimedia displays about music and even tried to conduct a virtual orchestra.

On Thursday we left early to stock up at the supermarket. We had forgotten that Thursday is ascension day and is a major public holiday in Europe. Fortunately this didn’t really end up effecting our plan of going to Schoss Schonbrunn (the Hofburgs summer palace). We spent most of the day looking around the gardens and learning how to make apple strudel. In fact we didn’t end up having lunch till 3pm… had a whirlwind tour of the palace and then raced back into the city to catch one of the last trains to Prague.

Things seemed to going very well, we had 25 minutes to make the last 20 minutes of the journey to the train station in Vienna when we leaped onto a train travelling in the wrong direction! As you can imagine that created one very stressed Susan who dashed for the rail boards to find out which platform the train was leaving from as I sprinted to get our packs from left luggage. Alls well that ends well though and we were siting in our seats in the train with a whole 5 minutes to spare.

Arriving into Prague was the most unusual experience. In with a bit of retrospection no city train station at 10:30pm is a desirable place to be… However it felt like I had arrived into some scene from a Bond film.. or perhaps The Saint. The station had a really soviet air to it. There were armed police loitering around and loads of dodgy looking people just hanging around for now reason. I felt very sorry for the Canadian girl who asked us if we going to her hostel by any chance… regrettably we weren’t but perhaps in hindsight we should have made a bit of a detour.

The exciting new this week is that we have just booked our latest European trip. After brief breaks in many of the Western European Countries, we decided to do a big tiki tour of Central Europe.
As Easyjet doesn’t fly into many of the countries we want to visit we have come up with the following combo.
1 Fly into Geneva in Switzerland
2 Train to Zürich
3 Train into one of Europe’s smallest countries Lichtenstein
4 Train over to Salzburg
5 Then do the same to Vienna
6 Finally Train to Prague and fly back to Bristol

We are going to be away for 13 days in total and many of those days will be in the 2 most expensive countries in Europe. So this weekend will probably be spent organising hostels to try to keep the cost of the trip down.

Susan is stoked as she gets to see Lichtenstein. If you are like me and have never heard of this country….Let me fill you in:
Lichtenstein is a very small landlocked country in a valley, it’s the only country which is locked by two other landlocked countries (Switzerland and Austria). Apart from that it produces valuable postage stamps and people go there mainly to get a stamp in their passport. I’ll be sure to upload some pics and let you know if we can find someone from border control.

This weekend we had look around Clifton Village which is the posh part of Bristol. It is where all this years’ model of BMW congregates with the for show pet poodles outside trendy cafes while the owners sip lattés and read the times. A complete contrast to ASDA in Bedminster let me tell you. While in Clifton Village we found a deli which sells South African food so Susan was kept busy for a while deciding which favour of Mrs Ball chutney to purchase.

Apart from condiments keeping to our boardgame geeky traditional we have purchased another game. It’s called Carcassonne – Hunters and Gathers and is a bit like a cross between Dominos and Settlers. The highlight for me being that I can beat Susan at it… Yeah!

My keeping fit New Year’s resolution is going quite well and I’m managing at least three gym session each week. This dedication combined with the fact that Susan seems to have become the latest GI diet devotee is bound to ensure my success or at least consolidated misery.

All this training has hardly dented my rowing time (dropping by 20 seconds). Last week my time was the worst of the field. Weight and Age adjustments resulted in Susan beating me which as you can imagine made me an easy mocking target for the guys in London today.

Current Rowing time 8:16