Regensburg, Germany

Ok, so we get back from Karlovy Vary and already the breakfast table discussions are around "where to next week-end". You just gotta love it!

At this stage, it is pretty much the first name that pops into our heads, that is where we go. Someone mentioned to me in passing that Regensburg is a pretty little town in Germany, not far from the Czech border, so that becomes the destination for a long week-end break. I have to admit, I had never heard of the town before then and on doing the basic internet research find myself getting more and more excited about the trip to the little town that has the remains of a Roman Fort dating back to 900AD and a town that was untouched by the world wars and remains pretty much in tact, as-was for the last few hundred years. Our next logistics discussions are around how to travel there. As with the rest of Europe, once you are at a destination, there is no need for your own transport as the public transport systems are so jacked (and generally because within the small towns, everything is in walking distance anyway). And even so, the public transport to get to the town is equally as efficient. Doing the sums we decided to rent a car for the week-end (the smallest Kia you've ever seen - the backpack hardly fitted in the boot).

With Colin's now very trusty and heavily relied upon travel-mate-GPS-thingy, we navigate flawlessly with only an occasional "stay on the right!!!" out the town of Plzen on Thursday midday and onto the freeway to Germany. Crossing the border was a non-event and we arrive in Regensburg at rush-hour. We circled the hotel a few times trying to work out where the parking was while attempting to decipher German road signs. After our last run in with an "ein maal strasse", we are ever so cautious and had the nerve wracking feeling that we were driving up wrong ways constantly. After unpacking at the hotel, the first evening was spent non-eventfully browsing the mall across the street in the vain hope that the Germans have heard of Marmite and got distracted with buying new running shoes.

Friday morning we geared up with city maps and strolled into the old town (one block away from the hotel). We had no set course or plan, but followed whatever caught our eye first. As we came into the old town, there is a green belt that surrounds the city. We followed the path and as it was still early morning (about 9am), there was a very crisp, fresh feeling about with birds chirping that really set the tone for the morning. The girls came into their own once their feet hit the grass and the hit the ground running. They found a fountain and a kiddies play park and we let the morning idle past as we strolled through the park.

As it turned out, we were walking around the Royal park that surrounded the very large palace of Thurn & Taxis that has more rooms that Buckingham Palace. It is still in use today and Princess Gloria spends her time between Kenya (of all places) and here.

After strolling around the outside of the castle, we found the entrance and since the information and tours were only open from 10:30, we decided to leave the tour till later (it was still only 9:30). Meandering through the old town was like walking through a maze. The streets narrow down to a single alley that a bicycle would have trouble passing through to large double lane streets that are all paved and where pedestrians have the right of way. Even after 4 days in the town, we were still able to find a little back path that we had not strolled down yet, each lined with quaint shops that beg you to stop and browse at the window for a while.

According to the story of the town, it was wealthy in the 1700s as a main post along the trade route and the wealthy families built large houses each with towers to boast of their riches. Now today, each of these towers has large clocks on them and you can honestly never be without the time in sight - and even more amazing is that they all tell the same time.

The buildings are very striking and similarly to Karlovy Vary, they are all painted in bright bold colours that beg to be photographed.

At around 10am we idled into a square in front of the very intimidating St Peters Church with it's spires that are visible from miles around and sat down to enjoy coffee in the sunshine while Colin took the opportunity to try and capture the church in film - not an easy task. We sat in this courtyard for a good hour watching the tourists come and go and the day getting progressively warmer (notice that these are probably the first photos you have seen of our heads without beanies!!!)

Below are the steeples of St Peters.

Unlike other trips, we came reasonably unplanned and unprepared as far as the tourist sights were concerned and mostly just happened upon the attractions by chance. We knew that the sights were somewhere in the town, but did not plan specific routes and paths to get to them. This was the one example. We saw a bunch of tourists madly photographing this building and it dawned upon us (like a sledgehammer) that this was the site of the remains of the Roman Fort (Castra Regina) which began in Regensburg in 179 AD!

Ok, history and sightseeing aside. My absolute favourite-favourite was the ice cream cafe in Neupfamplatz. We made a trip past it nearly every afternoon. I think the girls enjoyed it too :)

Our next discovery was the Donau River (Danube) and the Old Stone Bridge (built in 1135) which you can see through the archway (and yes, we were brave enough to cross it).

We meandered along the bank of the Danube amongst local students eating pizzas and spent some time feeding the ducks. We then had lunch alongside the bridge at the oldest sausage restaurant dating back 500 years. Lunch consisted of a plate of saurkraut with 8 grilled sausages - don't be deceived, it was really very good and tasted much better than it sounds. The girls didn't even venture a taste at the saurkraut but guzzled the sausages and bread rolls.

Crossing the river (yes, along the old stone bridge built in 1137) the two girls are fully engaged in conversations of national importance. Something about a puppy riding a horsie and the mommy that was very brave and could swim - Sarah has taken to remembering her dreams with vivid clarity and creativity.
Mom following behind ...

A note here: We have been in search of a world map since we got here and as you can see below, we are now the proud owners of a VERY large world map that is already stuck on our wall by the front door and is the only picture on our walls so far (apart from the girls artwork).

After crossing the main part of the river, the river forks into a side stream with an island in the middle. This is a favourite spot for students with their pizzas and radios and we joined in the lazy mood for the afternoon, spending it by the banks of the river - Colin taking photos, me reading my tourist guides and the girls playing, with the most beautiful view of the old town across the water ....

As the sun dipped down on the horizon (probably close to 7pm) we headed back across the bridge to find a spot for supper. Amber and Sarah amused themselves at the table by drawing on the paper serviettes - Sarah has just mastered the number 8 and was proudly showing us all her 8's and SARAH's that she had drawn.

Saturday was a very laid back day. It started at the mall because Sarah had walked holes right through the soles of her only 1 month old shoes and needed a new pair.

By the time we got into town, it was nearly lunch and the fountain with the bratworst hotdog stand looked far too tempting to pass by. The girls amused themselves by chasing pigeons around the fountains much to the amusement of all the onlookers.

After lunch, we strolled back to the Thurn & Taxis palace and did a tour of the museum (jewelry, china and carriages) and then did a tour of the palace itself. The tour was in German, but they provide English tapes of the tour - wait for it ... - on walkmans! Can't remember when last I saw one of those. Unfortunately, we had a very uptight German tour guide who was very intolerant of the 2 under 5's of the group. It was a 90 minute tour and they had to be completely silent. Even though they were the most well behaved I have probably seen them on a tour, the occasional whisper of "what's that mommy" got a telling off by the guide. But never mind, we made up for it with them afterwards with a big slice of Chocolate cake each at a coffee shop in town.

After supper at a traditional restaurant, we walked back to the hotel, dreaming of what we should do the next day.

A Week-end in Regensburg, Germany

Check out our web album for the week-end photies - the blog to follow shortly.

Spring Day

Believe it or not, today it is officially spring. You would never say so judging by the weather, but the girls came home today full of the joys showing off their "spring fairies" that they had drawn.


She has even has flower eyes and flower boobs :)

Andělská Hora and Locket

After our walk in the forrest on Sunday morning, we headed out of Karlovy Vary to visit the castle at Andelska Hora.

It was founded sometime in the 14th century along the trade route to Prague. It is now in total ruin, but somehow that just feeds the fantasy. Walking through the rubble and ruin, you find yourself dreaming and imagining what used to happen there during that time. I would imagine the knights standing at the lookouts watching the approaching horseback riders coming over the hills in the distance.

The wind was blowing an outright gale and at some points, I could not walk foreward even though my leg was raised, just waiting to come down in front of me and my weight was leant forward - it somehow reminded me of brother bear on the cliff riding the wind. A & S had a really rough time of it with the weather with howls coming from them everytime the wind blew in their face. It was also very cold and the chill seemed to find us through our jackets and in the gaps.

Weather aside, it was definitely one of the better castle experiences I have had since being in Europe.

On leaving Andelska Hora, Colin's faithful GPS started to guide us to the next destination (only a minor glitch at the start where we had the wrong location pinned in), but when we started heading NE instead of SW, I questioned the GPS loudly enough for Colin to relook at the route and put in the new location. We also had some very interesting moments where the GPS got totally confused on itself with new roads popping up very inconsiderately and then others being blocked off just to confuse us all, so the poor GPS thought that we were riding across the fields on a number of occasions.

Our next destination was Loket on the other side of Karlovy Vary. This time, an older castle than Andelska Hora (from 1170) and one that is infact completely in tact and still in use.

The wind had turned into rain, so we visited the local restaurant for lunch within the castle walls before heading to the castle fortress.

The most grissly part of the tour is the torture chamber with all manor of exhibits of the methods and instruments of torture - dummies, sound effects, the works! Needless to say, Colin and I took turns to view the chamber with the girls playing outside.

On the route back home to Plzen, I set the way-points for the furthest out of the way towns and villages that I could find to get home (and added a cool hour onto the journey which only doubled the time to get home :)). We went through the smallest villages, that if there hadn't been a village starting and village ending sign, I am sure that we would not have known it was there. It also took us through some beautiful forrests on some rather more dodgy roads. It felt very good to be able to let whim and fancy steer our course home.

Trip to Karlovy Vary

This past weekend was to prove a real cocktail of experiences - not all bad ;)

Starting at the beginning... Karlovy Vary is a town built on and about a whole stack of hot springs. These springs have been acclaimed for the healing power of their waters, which are apparently frequently prescribed as medicine for an array of maladies. Despite the... shall we say "curious" taste of the water, there still seem to be hundreds of people quaffing it down zealously.
We planned the trip there during the previous week and were to go by car (enter cocktail ingredient one from the right side of the road). Which, was to be our first efforts behind the wheel of any kind of vehicle since January and then with the obvious excitement factor of having to dodge so many cars persisting on driving on the wrong side of the road... I kid, and we had all of 2 experiences in this new and strange system.
Hayley collected the car with the kids on Friday and came through to the flat to collect the baggage and the husband. She couldn't jimmy the kids out of the car for all the sweets in the country though, they were thrilled to be sitting in a car again - this means that they don't have to walk anywhere!
Bugz proceeded to drive us there, and with the minor infraction of almost driving down the wrong way of the main road just outside our house, all went well and we arrived, precisely as my TomTom directed us, in front of our little B&B.
The drive down saw Hayley smiling from ear to ear as has been her expression many times since our arrival at the pure joy of doing all this cool travel and stuff - driving for the first time and being alive at that one hour into the trip.

If I ever get to submit a suggestion to TomTom it's going to have to be "add a scenic route option to the navigation choices" this for people who want to get places via as many others as possible...
The house where we stayed is owned and run by a German tannie with an unusual grasp of English, which made a welcome change. We had 2 comfy rooms, so had an amount of space for us and the girls, a view of the town from up on the hill, (and believe me, this town is very very pretty to look at), a kitchenette, and our own bathroom etc. Very nice. Apart from the very squeaky beds the place was perfect, expensive for what you get, but still cheap compared to other options in the town.
We decided to take a little drive around town before din dins on Friday nite just to get our bearings and see the place before the next day. It was late in the afternoon, but light enough with clear skies to see the very pretty little town so packed with colour below us as we drove down the windy roads to the centre.
Enter the next cocktail ingredient wearing a police officers uniform! :0
We were casually minding our business, Hayley driving us through the town when without any prompting 2 uniformed officers in the road ahead of us waved us down.
I think our collective blood temperature dropped a few degrees as we saw them motion for us to pull over as suddenly we simultaneously remembered all the horror stories we've heard about the foreign police, the fact that all our identification, passports, drivers licenses etc. are all back at the B&B, our kids were not strapped into the legally-required car chairs... and oh, lordy who will look after our children while we rot, forgotten in some Romanian jail???
The cops offered us a choice of German or Russian to converse in, which we were thrilled at... at least they gave us a choice.
Asking for passports we kinda had to admit that as a result of our delirious joy at being in their most magnificent town we had clean forgotten to bring them with and how terribly sorry we were for having been so forgetful.
On hearing this stream of English, the 2 cops grew visible question marks on their faces and wondered how we missed the "German or Russian" choice! repeating the question a few times and getting no intelligible answers, the one cop leant into the window and insisted... "Sprechen ze Deutch?" to which I boldly replied "Kleine... kleine" satisfied that I could manage a single word he proceeded slowly... "Die strasse" pointing emphatically to the road beneath his feet "is einmal strasse!"
I don't really know if I have the spelling of any of this right, but we figured out very quickly that the direction we were pointing in was not the one permitted by the two very obvious road signs at the beginning of the boulevard!
We burst into a chorus of deep apologies and, as a single person they wheeled on their heels and walked away! Sheepishly we "U-Turned" and waving to our fans on the roadside made our way directly back to where we had come from and got out of the car.

Dinner that night was et at a small local pub / restaurant thingy where the food was good, the beer was better and a great evening was had by us all.
Just before we left, Sarah declared that she needed to wee-wee and so off the troop of girls set to the loo, the door to which was not 20M from our table... after all the necessary doings were done the hand washing got under way... my girls are not particularly quiet on a good day so I could hear some kind of commotion behind the door.
Wondering what was going on, Sarah blew through the door calling to me loudly that they couldn't close the tap... "great" I thought "now we have to explain how we broke the tap!". Entering the girls loo i see Hayley and Amber twisting with all their might on the poor handle of the cold tap, Hayley has taken a position against the wall for maximum leverage and is really doing her best to screw that handle in.
Stubbornly the tap still has a decent steady stream of water running out. Walking up to the basin I gently take hold of the hot tap and twist it softly clockwise... unbelievably the flow ceases and I know my wife has had one too many beers!
The next morning we woke up to a significant drop in temperature which has been with us all week. From unseasonal and comfy teens to very low single degrees and great overcast skies - rain forecast, the whole tooty...
Bravely we ventured forth all dressed for the occasion and proceeded to have a great time in the city. Needless to say we took the bus into the centre, walked the place flat the whole day and walked home in the evening.
KV is pretty! It is by far and away the most colourful town I've ever seen. Despite the overcast skies, the colours of the buildings and surrounds was still striking.

KV spring water as I mentioned is a renowned elixir and there were hundreds of people filling containers and special drinking cups (that are sold everywhere - below Hayley choosing cups for the babies)

and merrily drinking their ills away.
The water is hot - some of the springs have temperatures in the neighbourhood of 80 degrees C, others are a little cooler. The taste varies from horrid to disgusting and every sip sits like a hot rock in your stomach, well mine at least.
The babies didn't seem to mind though...




This is obviously just one aspect of the spring town - there is a massive industry around the baths and beauty treatments to be found here. This is one thing we didn't try... that's for next time :)

Like there is a wine route in the Cape - in KV there is a water route with springs popping out of the pavement all over the place. They are all sort of institutionalised, with their statistics like mineral content, temp and so on placed on plaques over them, and they are all housed in more or less grand colonnades...







KV is not as small as one might think, or certainly as one sees the spring centre. Built on hilly ground the town centre is in a valley and built up all around are suburbs and business districts looking down on it. A striking feature is that one finds the most run-down and abandoned buildings right next to flourishing hotels - very odd, esp as some of them have very good locations.
We spent quite some time on the upper level of the town looking down.


There are a few "lookouts" built around the town, two named after Charles and Diana, we took a trip up the Diana lookout in a custom tram (funicular?) that had to climb a hill so steep that the cars are built like stairs and pulled up by a cable.
The lookout is built on the top of a hill in the middle of a forest - very pretty. But up there where there is nothing keeping the wind at bay it was a veritable gale and we didn't stay up too long.

We found a nice little out-of-the-way pub for dinner and headed home for an early nite.

Sunday morning was even colder than Saturday. The day was planned to be spent in the car doing some of the nearby sights and then going directly home in the evening afterwards.
Before we left the B&B Hayley suggested that we walk in the forest at the end of the street - literally one house away from our B&B.
The girls had an absolute blast - take a look...

This is the fabled "Pink Ninja" - mythical guardian of the Karlovy Vary forests. Death is a drawn out and gruesome certainty.


The girls wanted to build a nest for a birdie, so they set about gathering the small branches that had been broken off by the strong winds and assembling a large, but rough nest. Clearing a small patch in the centre they declared that even an eagle birdie could be happy here...


On to Andělská Hora and Loket Castle ...

Karlovy Vary

This is where we will be this week-end. Will tell you all about it when we get back!
(See the town's home page)

Skating at Skoda Park

Welcome to life in the slow lane! Well actually, they were doing mach III, but welcome to a Sunday afternoon in Plzen.

I guess there is not much to watch on the telly, but on a week-end, the parks are packed and the Skoda sports park was bustling. In the centre of the skating circle, are a few beach volleyball courts, skate-hockey court, mini tennis courts, ramps and tricks for bikes / skateboards.

After only having their skates for less than a week, I am truly amazed at how quickly Amber & Sarah have got the basics of skating. What really helped was when I bought my skates on Saturday morning and they were able to watch what I do with my feet as we skated on our street in the afternoon. When we got to the skating park today, it was only a couple of laps of holding hands before Amber bravely ventured off on her own. A bit precariously, but without incident.

Sarah is a natural born skater. She was already doing the skating motion before Amber, but doesn't want anyone to know that she's brilliant. It is much easier to be towed by Mom than to have to skate :) but every now and then she forgets to fake it and she skates along brilliantly.

It was a stunning day today with blue skies streaked with jet trails. The view over the village roofs was very picturesque. The girls also had just as much fun playing in the giant sandpit (volleyball courts) as they did skating.

Maybe we can persuade Colin that the skating thing is "cool" in time for us to skate together next week-end ;)