Homecoming - Summer Trip To Czechia, Part 3: The Final Stretch

Jablonec - highly recommended for a swim

The final few days of our memorable stay had arrived, and Bonny Bee had a little work to do, so on Tuesday 11 August, I took the children out a short distance up the road to Smržovka, to the Museum of Military Technology. A fairly unkempt place with smallish warehouses and garages housing a variety of European and American tanks, jeeps, howitzers and radio equipment from the 1940s to the 1970s, the children were full of the right types of question: why was there war? Why should we need this stuff? Where is it usually kept?

Nobody was allowed to touch the exhibits, and the children were quite interested to know why we couldn’t run our hands down a 36-ton tank or stick our fingers in the firing holes, so I accosted the curator and asked her in front of the kids and a few other families, in a diplomatic way, why the exhibits were off-limits. And her reply was quite devastating: people take advantage of the situation and start climbing on the tanks to get a good picture. One “genius” had lost his teeth, she said, from falling off the gun turret of a British Challenger tank.

Fair enough, we all thought, and left it at that. It’s rather sad that a few idiots can ruin an experience for everyone else, but totally understandable action by the museum to prevent further undesirable accidents. Anyway, after this, the children had a better understanding of military equipment and their effects on our past. Now we are in the drone era, will there be a lot more of these tanks entering museums soon?

Smržovka, Museum of Military Technology

We jumped back in the car and went to pick up Bonny Bee to go for a ride somewhere. I was tired of making plans each day, so this was my day off and we would just improvise. We drove for half an hour and ended up in the town of Železný Brod, set on the gentle banks of the river Jizera. The town is nothing special, but alongside the river there are some lovely places to sit and enjoy the scenery. We had some lunch in a riverside inn and headed to Železný Brod’s main attraction, the Museum of Socialist Vehicles.

Železný Brod, Museum of Socialist Vehicles

And what a place it was. Even the customer service was peak 1980, with a very bookish and charmless young member of staff, the only one, who got around on a 40-year-old scooter. She was explaining to some other visitors the types of vehicles they were viewing, and was annoyed she had to return to the exit to take our money and abandon us again. The whole time she spent ignoring us even when I was right beside her as she spoke to the earlier visitors.

Železný Brod
Museum of
Socialist Vehicles

One room was darkened so we didn’t go in, but a few minutes later I heard her voice in there with the other group. It was an enormous depot with ambulances, police cars, buses and fire engines. She had not bothered to make that room accessible for just us, so if it were not for the other visitors, we would never have seen this part of the museum.

On the general level, Czech customer service is most definitely not as refined as Polish, and not as amenable as Irish. But this was a depth of frostiness I last encountered 35 years ago in the days I used to pound the streets of Bratislava, Moscow, Warsaw and Prague. It was alive and well in the Museum of Socialist Vehicles and it was another huge nostalgia hit. Considering this girl was barely 20, I wonder if she had received extra training to be able to achieve this level of detached icy coldness, or if she had been hired based on her stern and grim-faced personality.

For the final two days of our stay, we decided we wanted to revisit a couple of the things that we most enjoyed. We would return to Farma Vysoká for lunch and the Ještěd golf course in the evening on Wednesday 12 August, and to the Jablonec reservoir one last time on the final Thursday. After a lovely lunch at the farm, we needed to buy a few new clothes for the children, so we drove to the central shopping centre in Liberec, and to take a stroll around the historic centre.

Liberec is a city with a rich history, reflected in the buildings, such as the zoo that we had earlier visited. Liberec has a lot in common with Manchester, such as being former big glass and textile producing area. It also has an ornate city hall and iconic square, thriving shopping and catering sectors, and a lot of satellite towns and cities that rely on it for their economy.

The main square in Liberec

On the day we visited, the city was bathed in a fresh, sunny glow, made more special by a group of visiting organ grinders from other parts of Europe, all lined up outside the city hall and taking turns winding up some typical songs from their regions, dressed in traditional attire. The crowds were not very strong, as Czechs can be quite sceptical of nostalgia, but the ones who were there enjoyed the spectacle.

We moved down Pražská street, the main shopping thoroughfare, to look for some items to take home with us. Coming across a shop crammed with ornaments, trinkets, vases, hanging decorations, hand-made toys, clothes and porcelain vessels, I was sure we would find a few items here. The main thing we needed to do was to buy a present for our neighbours, who had been looking after our place while we were away, and I knew this was the place. The children were also fascinated by the sheer number of items for sale.

Time was getting on, so we made for the golf course, arriving in the early evening. We all played a lot better this time round, and I was delighted Dainoris had started aiming better. Milda decided to play with Livia in the toy room, and came out from time to time, to make sure we were still there! We sat down for raspberry lemonade and pizzas at the lovely club house café, and watched the sky go dark as the anticipated eclipse made its presence known to us all. It was quite eerie to hear the drop in noise levels coming from the trees.

Our scorecard

We drove home in the dying light, arriving well after dark. The car’s nutty GPS sent me on a rather convoluted route along some very narrow upland roads. On the other hand, it did allow us to film a flock of deer grazing in a field and take some spectacular shots of Ještěd mountain (stationary with brake on, I wish to add).

Our final full day in the Krkonoše would be spent in Jablonec at the reservoir, rounded off with a meal at the place we first went to when we got here, the Hotel Adria in Kořenov. The young lad who had served us that night was there again, and he did all the things necessary to make everyone happy. We sat outside, but under their terrace roof – the nights are sometimes a little nippy up there – and the children played in the garden beyond, or sat with us to warm up. There was still some wind, but I was determined not to go inside on our last night.

The Adria in the dying light

Arriving back at the holiday rental, we needed to get all the bags ready for the Great Journey Home over the next two days. This was going to be an undertaking to rival the docking schedule at the Port of Rotterdam: first, we had to take the car back to the airport, somehow get all our many bags to a hotel near the central station, then next morning schlepp them to the train for the 10.31 departure to Berlin, change at Berlin Südkreuz for BER airport, hope the weight was all right, pick them up the other end, get a bus in the middle of the night to our car and drive home well after midnight. I was quite jittery about it all, but I didn’t let that get to me, like I would have done not so long ago.

The main square in Liberec again

The morning of Friday 14 August started with a military-grade reveille as I went around making plans for clothes. I pack a separate small bag with everything we need for one night: clothes, toiletries, nightwear, phone chargers; then I carefully choreograph the morning routine with washing, breakfast, dressing, putting the dirty clothes in separate bags, packing the car up, and getting the kids to focus so there are no delays. Bonny Bee then goes around clearing the rest up into a final bag to slide into a suitcase, and cleaning the apartment as well as possible ready for the hosts to prepare for the next arrivals, apparently coming at 13.00, so we wanted to go as early as possible.

Speaking about the hosts, the family is charming, hard-working and very driven. I learned a lot from them. The parents, in their mid-to-late fifties, run three tourist apartments in their building. Their eldest son does a lot of the work too, and the youngest son is picking up the slack. They are building a wall at the back of the property to hide the hideous blocks of flats behind them. Their own grounds are immaculate, and a stream runs past the front of the garden.

We spoke to them on numerous occasions about whatever came to mind, and they treated us like part of the family, which made it all the more special. We had brought a couple of presents from Ireland, just in case. One of them was a washing up towel from the Woolley Jumpers range – they make everything from mugs to keyrings, pillowcases to fridge magnets with the same sheep on them, and we felt they deserved this, especially after the mother had done a load of washing for us and handed the clothes back dried and folded. I had asked her how I could “thank” her, and she just said “say thanks, that’s all”. But for me that wasn’t enough, so she got the towel, and a handsome towel it is, if you ever get the chance to look through their range. She was delighted, which proved it was definitely worth bringing it.

The place the owners stay in at Desná

We said our farewells and headed on the road south, back to Prague. The airport is on the other side of the city so we had to negotiate the urban sprawl. It had come as quite a shock how long it took me to get through the Prague suburbs, but we made it to the airport before the clock had ticked past the daily rate renewal. The areas around Prague airport are currently being redeveloped to cope with a new rail link and flyover to separate cars, buses and taxis into the airport, and finding the car dropoff parking garage was a little bit of a struggle.

The main issue was the number of luggage items, but not only. We needed to buy some child car seats when we arrived because the car rental company charged more than buying new ones. This of course added to our already mushrooming baggage. Despite being under our allotted allowance, we and the children were never going to be able to get very far with so many bags and suitcases. My idea was plain and simple: we post back the car seats and fill the boxes up with clothes we have already worn.

Arriving at the car rental desk, the queue was even longer than when we showed up. A Spanish family also dropping keys off was wondering if we all had to do the queue too. I took the initiative and calmly walked to the desk to hand over my key and the folder. The attendant smiled and wished me a happy journey. The Spanish family followed suit and that cued an acute need for trolleys. The only place we were going to have mobility freedom was at this airport while we brought our stuff to the taxi rank.

Dainoris has recently become very much my assistant in many areas, and enjoys going to places to help out. Pushing a trolley would be bread and butter to him – I brought two from the car park three floors up and presented him with one. We loaded our stuff and ventured out into the public area of the airport to find a taxi. There was no way I was going to get all this equipment on a bus. We didn’t have long to wait before a Vietnamese guy with a large black van targeted us and offered an extortionate fee to take us to our lodgings on Sokolská street near the Museum.

The National Museum
Our accommodation was
just behind the building
in the background

Reaching the location of our “hotel” for the night, which cost as much as four nights in the Krkonoše, we had no reception to negotiate – I had to fill everything in online in a time-consuming exercise that would have rivalled a Dutch council’s planning permission application. They sent a door code two hours before our allotted check-in. However, they also had luggage storage, and we could put our stuff downstairs until we returned later on.

We took the car seats and the bag with dirty washing with us and headed to the central post office. This historic building on the main thoroughfare from Wenceslas Square to Masaryk Station had around forty booths inside a huge atrium. Pulling off a ticket, we went to wait. We were fourth in the queue for foreign packages and it was going slow. I then realised we needed boxes and consignment slips. In a blind panic, I set off at speed to locate them. They were apparently at booth 12 and I could go there without another ticket. I got two but went back for a third. The woman kindly gave me a roll of sticky tape and the necessary slips. I hoped she would be the woman who took our number when it came up.

I was about three lines from the end of filling in the last form when our number came up. I decided to go over to the designated booth and fill the rest in when I got there. However, I kind of expected to be confronted with a combination of a world-weary drudge and a rude, stuffy clerk straight out of a Kafka novel. And that’s what I got. I told her I would just fill the last part out while the rest was being done and she sent me to another desk with the riposte, “there are others who are ready. Fill it out and don’t come to our desks with half-filled forms.”

I could tell this was going to be a long process. Once I had filled it in, which took a quarter of the time it did to serve the customer who took my place, I realised I was in front of the world’s most miserable civil servant, and after a quarter-century in and out of public sector workplaces, that takes some beating. She then castigated me over the fact I hadn’t put a house number in the appropriate box. Telling her we don’t have house numbers in rural Ireland, she blabbed some poisonous words under her breath and produced one of those deep sighs that I would reserve for having to get out of bed at three in the morning to find a kid’s lost toy.

I had to hold my tongue because she was actually dealing in our belongings; the ultimate power play was very one-sided. She managed to do the rest of the filing without having to resort to the level of abrupt hand gesticulations or widening her eyes, and I took the three slips from her without giving her the “thank you” she undoubtedly expected. We headed out into the mid-thirty-degree heat of the city – I was so wet and sweaty from that and carrying the luggage that I looked like I had stood in a car wash for thirty seconds.

The cubist interior of the Grand Café Orient

We went off to eat a late lunch – it was about three in the afternoon – and I had the sudden idea of visiting the Grand Café Orient to see if some familiar faces were serving, and I’m glad I did. Ten to fifteen years ago, when we frequented Prague more often than the hairdresser’s, there was a waiter who would frequently make our visits to the café a more amusing or meaningful experience, and this was no exception, although this time there were five of us, not two. He remembered a lot from our visits, more than us, actually, and entertained the kids like he’d been doing it for years. Dainoris gave him a big hug at the end, which is unusual for him.

Following this, we wandered to our hotel to check out our lodgings for the night. The lift up was one of those where you can do the Spiderman impression as the swing door closes. The type that I got stuck in in Spain a couple of years earlier. Taking out the luggage I had prepared for one night, we entered the code to retrieve the key to the room. Well, I say room; it was in fact a suite, which accounted for the price.

There were two bathrooms, a large kitchen, two single bedrooms, and a large triple bedroom with office space, TV, two balconies overlooking the busiest road junction in the entire country, and remote-control air conditioning. It’s the type of place I’d maybe rent if I were planning not to go out for days, but it’s a total waste of money on people like us that just come back to sleep.

Bonny Bee stayed back to work for a couple of hours, and I took the children out to find some activities in the early evening. We walked back down Wenceslas Square onto Vodičková, where there is a garden café. The staff member at the entrance issued a rather terse statement that the garden was closed off for another hour, but we could sit inside. It was still over thirty degrees outside and none of us wanted to do that. We chose to leave.

We walked through the Svĕtozor shopping mall to the Franciscan Gardens, a hidden oasis of peace between all the houses, shops and restaurants, where there is a giant playground. Just then, a chalk board caught my attention. There was a counter straddling a fairly well-hidden door, a portal even, where a girl was serving drinks and snacks from a kitchen, including raspberry lemonade. That was enough to get me ringing the little bell she had there in case she wasn’t visible.

The terrace at Langhan's, pulled from their website:
https://www.clovekvtisni.cz/co-delame/kavarna-a-centrum-langhans

Behind her was a fountain of gushing water and what seemed to be a terrace with chairs and tables. I asked her if we could come in and drink, and where the entrance to the café was. She told us we had to go back through the shopping mall and in through the camera shop. I was not amazed that I had never stumbled upon this place before, but excited to find it. I sold it to the kids by saying there was a secret garden, and we needed to go round the block to get in.

To say this place, between a shop and a hidden garden, was off the beaten track, was like saying Gaudí was a little showy. We had walked around the mall for a good five minutes looking for the entrance like a shoplifter and three decoys. Like a Southern Baptist’s wedding night, we just couldn’t find the entrance, so the girl let us in by moving the counter out of the way.

Inside this inner sanctum of secret gardens, the tables were located around the outside of a gravel-laden terrace. A canvas sail was tied to different points around the terrace and a huge raised trough with several taps pumping water around had a very random load of rubber ducks floating in it. Seeing this, the children barely sat down – they just played with the ducks and the water, as I sat there catching up on the day’s messages, upset that they preferred that to a chat with their old dad. I see it as a good sign, though, that I enjoyed their conversation.

The place was going to close soon, so we decided to wait for Bonny Bee in the playground inside the Franciscan Gardens out back. To get there, we discovered the way – we had to go further outside the shopping mall onto the street itself and through an unfathomably sanitised corridor resembling one you might find in a Spanish three-star hotel, past a security guard, and in through another kind of “portal” on the inside.

Milda enjoys a refreshing strawberry lemonade

After a while, their mother made it out of her work duties and joined us. The sun was casting long shadows by this time and we were getting hungry. I wanted us to have one more round of “happy food” and I knew just the place. Blatnička restaurant on Michalská has a good limited menu, with some fine dishes, even if it’s well overpriced. The streetside dining area was populated by Germans and the odd American. I don’t think the former appreciated our rabble destroying their speechless evening, and I got quite a few glances when I gave our orders to the woman who runs the place in Czech. They had let their kids eat the safe, familiar, boring cliché pasta dish, so when Dainoris chose the river salmon with rice and salad, and Milda wanted the goulash and dumplings, I couldn’t let the moment pass without saying a few words of congratulations. Whether they were subliminally to myself, I couldn’t tell, but my “happy food” mantra had clearly worked.

Food from Blatnička restaurant on Michalská

After this fine valedictory meal, we wanted to take one last walk through the city centre and over Charles Bridge. Livia protested at the idea of going for a walk, and became more and more animated the further we went. Of course, whichever direction we chose we would still have ten to fifteen minutes’ walk, and for that reason we carried on. Charles Bridge was lit up with the dim but effective lamps making this one of the most romantic places on Earth, but Livia’s protests were dampening the mood somewhat. If you want to reason with her, you may as well ask the cat, because it’s not going to happen. Still, we managed some nice photos.

On the other side, we wanted a last drink before we took the 22 tram back to our humble lodgings, but all the hostelries were finishing up. We took the opportunity to get a head start on sleep: the day after was going to be a long one. Livia was quite relieved to get off the streets and into a relatively peaceful apartment. Relatively, because outside, the traffic was still thundering past; now and again there was the odd ambulance, but it was the number of drivers playing the most appalling music with the bass on that was the worst. Until the night club across the street started up.

We were fortunately too tired to notice, but if we had been staying here for those first nine days, I think I would have bought a catapult and found some small rocks. The noise was relentless. And that was why we were able to sleep, I guess, because stop-start noise like people making conversation even Spanish ones, can increase and decrease in noise levels, whereas this constant stream of combustible engine, music and siren was just white noise in the end.

The final morning, Saturday 15 August, was a gentler start than I had expected. The children played happily in one of the bedrooms and we awoke to the gentle sound of revving engines at the traffic lights below. Washing, dressing and thrusting everything into bags, we walked to the lift to go and retrieve our bags in the cellar. And guess what? The lift was out of action. The cleaners were around, so I’m guessing they had left a door open somewhere, as you can do on those preposterous relics of the twentieth century.

We hurried down the stairs and retrieved our stuff, bringing it all to the porte cochère on the ground floor. I led the way with the enormous suitcase on four wheels – you know, the ones that wander off at the slightest breeze or incline – and a couple of other bags twisted over my shoulder, the others taking what they could, and we made the ten-minute walk to the station. It’s a very, very perfidious walk, because you see the station in front of you, but the entrance is actually below it and about fifty metres further forward. Never walk straight towards a building surrounded by communist-era infrastructure; you may never find your way out again.

Arriving a good 40 minutes before departure, we stocked up on in-journey snacks and bought a breakfast of croissants, pains-au-chocolat, cinnamon whirls and coffee, and found a very unsuitable place to consume them. Then we headed to our platform.

The Czechs have a word for Schadenfreude, which doesn’t surprise me, and that word is škodolibost. Considering almost everyone taking the train to Berlin was going to have luggage, the wits in the controlling box had decided to let us all go to the platform at the very, very end of the tunnel. The only one without an escalator. The one with very little space to wait with such large bags. That one.

The train trundled into the station and came to a halt. Our carriage was three further up and I was in no hurry to rush, especially as we had reservations for this journey. I let the minions all rush to their doors and slowly embark while we enjoyed the last breaths of fresh air before the hermetically sealed four-hour ride to Berlin. Fortunately there was still enough space for all our bags in the luggage area, and we made our way to the seats.

I had been sweating again, and looked like I had stood under a leaky roof gutter in a thunderstorm. Other passengers were looking at me like I was some kind of disgusting monster, which was my cue to have a wash and a change. Czech trains are actually quite comfortable; better than the German ones that serve Prague, anyhow, and the bathroom was clean, spacious and didn’t smell of that putrid jollop they put in most railway toilets.

Feeling refreshed, we slowly wended our way through the Labe valley towards the German border, past pretty villages with riverside houses, hotels, parks, forests and cliffs. People got on and off at the stations – this was also a commuter train, albeit for students, weekly workers and families on their way to their country cottage – and soon enough we entered Germany, leaving behind the hills and moving sedately across the plains of northern Saxony and Brandenburg.

About ten minutes before we were due at Berlin Südkreuz, I sprang into action, gathering our luggage nearer to the door so that we could disembark without panic. The train was only due to remain in the station for two minutes. We managed to get all the bags off and positioned ourselves away from the edge. Mistakenly thinking Südkreuz would be a good place to eat, I persuaded everyone to leave the station – there were apparently some restaurants in the area, according to Google Maps. Wrong. The station is a gastronomic wilderness unless you like kebabs or sandwiches as your main meal of the day.

We went to the platform to await the train to the airport; surely a brand-new transport hub like that would have plenty of places to eat… wouldn’t it? While we waited for the train, a man with a football scarf wielding an empty bottle of weak beer oscillated in front of Milda smelling of an early start on the sauce: it was only about half-past two. He tried to strike up a conversation – I forget about what – when Milda delivered the killer line: “are you a drunk man?” We were screaming with laughter inside, but we didn’t want to raise his fury, as we all know what angry alcoholics are capable of.

The train arrived and we hurried inside before he could follow us. Milda had dropped a toy and he picked it up to give to her, which set up an awkward moment where we felt we had to engage with him. Fortunately he remained on the platform and the train dawdled its way to the airport.

Arriving there, we were impressed by the layout. Underground rail connections, ground-floor road transport, first floor arrivals, upper floor departures. It’s all neatly contained in a huge glass-and-metal box. There were just a few things missing from the public areas, namely a decent place to eat.

Brown food menu

Mövenpick had a deceivingly poor eaterie on the arrivals floor – despite numerous images of nature, huge jars of pasta, and some meaningless AI slogans on the walls, their menu was a perfect example of everything wrong with German self-confidence in the catering sector: Wiener sausage with bread or potato salad; veal sausage with curry sauce and bread; veal sausage with curry sauce and potato salad. The only variation was jacket potato with herb-flavoured cottage cheese. And that was it. Oh, and some soup. I asked the staff member if there was anything else that wasn’t beige or brown. No, there wasn’t. These culinary wonders for five of us came to almost fifty euro, which caused me to take a few photos to post warnings on appropriate websites.

For dessert, we moved back upstairs where there was some light at a café situated in the middle of the hall. We needed to be there at some point, and as we were four hours early, we thought we might as well see if there was something less disappointing going on. However, for a café in the middle of the departures hall in Germany’s principal airport, there was a frighteningly low number of decent cakes and pastries. There was also a dearth of any atmosphere at all. The place is as soulless as a Czech post office worker.

Stuff they don't sell

I opted for a cinnamon bun, which was drier than a Berliner’s sense of humour, and a latte macchiato. I asked for a flat white but they didn’t do that without charging me double for the use of their coffee supply. The service, slightly less frosty than Prague’s post office (but not by much), made me seriously question the judgement of this airport’s managers. You would think they, along with maybe the German tourist board, would make some effort to showcase German food and hospitality to the world, but no, this was it. This was all they were able to rustle up, and it was – no, it is – unacceptable.

We hung around in the departure lounge café, Adler&Bär, a play-on-words of Berlin’s and Brandenburg’s coats of arms, for as long as humanly possible without springing a leak in my patience gasket. When I saw the Aer Lingus baggage handlers had opened up, I made a beeline for them, if for no other reason than to jettison our trolleys and head airside, where I hoped there was something better to eat.

A miserably dry cinnamon bun 

The staff at security were very kind, and made the children’s experience as stressless as possible, which led us into the core of the airport. With the usual mix of perfumes, chocolates and expensive bottles (why would anyone in their right minds purchase a bottle of Moët & Chandon for double the price in Berlin airport?) we found a gem of a shop called Die Kleine Gesellschaft, where a Peruvian woman was selling all kinds of things for children that you wouldn’t find in a chain store. I bought myself a lovely colourful washbag to replace the one I had, which was far too small.

There was, in fact, a food court on a mezzanine, high up in the gallery of the departure lounge of Terminal 1. It looked very similar to a shopping mall dining area with various choices from more sausage to Chinese, Italian to fish & chips. We settled on getting drinks from the main bar in the middle. I noticed people at some food outlets cleaning tables and putting up chairs – and considering it was only half past eight on a Saturday night in August, this was another dismal disillusionment, but at least the place was consistent in that respect. We managed to get a few dishes from the Asian outlet but virtually all the others were closed or in a state of deep cleaning up.

The German word Feierabend is a compound noun, and a most important concept in the national psyche. Feier means celebration, and Abend means evening, and is used to describe the end of the working day, both the closing up and the after-work hours that follow. Wishing someone Schönen Feierabend is very common. Although we would wish someone a pleasant evening, it doesn’t go the full distance in the idea of rest, relaxation, free time and leisure as the German concept of Feierabend. And Berlin Airport suffers from a chronic case of Feierabenditis, I fear. While we were sitting there eating the final serving of food from the Asian outlet, the rubbish collector went past clearing all the bins and tipping any used food trays into a sack. He looked at us, smiled, and asked us politely to put our waste at the edge of the far counter as he was about to start his own Feierabend.

The whole area was silent: people went about their business going to their departure gates, but nobody was allowed a coffee. This is Berlin Airport in peak holiday season, not Idar-Oberstein on a random Tuesday in March. What do people do with overnight interconnecting flights?

And so the time came to head to our own departure gate. First, though, we had to pass through ID checks. The automated passport control barriers are no good with children as they can’t reach the height for the AI checker to work, meaning we had to find a police booth open in the world’s largest tribute to the Marie Celeste. The kids checking our passports were fine and we were through and into the holding zone, which was full to bursting with nobody holding a takeaway cup or a sandwich.

The Midlands of the United Kingdom from the air

The plane journey was perfect in that it was uneventful and incident-free. Arriving at Dublin Airport showed the vast difference: people were sitting in cafés or standing around taking a breather after the luggage carousel. Music was playing – OK, it was Westlife, but it created a welcoming vibe. Airports are often the first impression people have of a new country and Berlin had failed. Dismally. The best airport arrival I ever had was landing in Marco Polo in Venice with the smell of piping hot pizza wafting down the gangways. That was the most effective way to say “welcome to Italy” without having to erect a single sign.

We had grabbed some trolleys and loaded all our luggage onto them, and were now making our way to the bus drop-off area some distance from the terminal. I called the parking company to send their bus out to get us, and stood there waiting for them. A few other people showed up, including two women who wondered if we were waiting for the same bus. When I told her we were, one asked when the bus was coming. I told her I’d called but there was such a lot of noise, I hadn’t heard how long, so she called herself and discovered it was two minutes away. This is the kind of helpful collaboration I really missed, and soon enough we all boarded.

At the other end, I walked through the vast parking space to where I remember my car was and brought it round to the front where a guy was hosing a short queue of cars down before they drove off. I had a full tank of petrol but my tyre light was on and this place didn’t have a spare pump. I drove to the Circle K in Finglas, a suburb of Dublin, where a homeless woman was rough sleeping on the parapet outside the shop.

As I was pumping up the tyres to the specified degree, I didn’t hear it go beep, so I asked Bonny Bee to tell me. The homeless woman informed us the machine does go beep, and we should just wait for it. She was right. More helpful words. I thanked her and asked her if she had everything she needed. She was fine, she said.

And these short, polite conversations with strangers is this country’s way of saying “welcome to Ireland”. We had made it back to our new home.

EXTRA PHOTOS:

Jablonec looking sunny

Portraits on Charles Bridge

Prague Metro

Smržovka, Museum of Military Technology

Železný Brod

Homecoming - Summer Trip To Czechia, Part 2: Krkonoše

Špindlerův Mlýn, close to the source of the River Labe (Elbe)

It was 10.45 on Sunday 2 August. The taxis came to pick us up at exactly the time I’d requested to take us to the airport. We weren’t flying anywhere, but we had rented cars from a cheap hire firm located at one of the last peripheral outposts at Václav Havel Airport. The two drivers loaded everything up and we set off. The driver in my car was a personable chap with a perfect taxi driver’s manner: asking lots of questions about us, commenting on my Czech, discussing the music scene in the country, which he picked up was one of my favourite subjects. He earned his tip.

When we arrived at the building where all the car hire cartels are located, we took our things and I sat the others down while I went to queue. There were about twelve people in front, so I was destined to be there for the long haul. Arriving at the front, I was faced with a stern-looking man who had probably never been fooled by anything in his life. He went through the procedure as if he had done it many, many times before, and told me if I upgraded to another level of insurance he would give me a larger car. I acquiesced, although this being Prague, I was expecting a nag instead of a mule.

In the end, it was a Škoda Karoq, which filled me with the most abominable dread – the daunting kind of horror I would usually reserve for having to traverse a rope bridge over a canyon backwards at night during a mosquito plague. There is something about Volkswagen interior technology that doesn’t agree with me: it is so labyrinthine and cumbersome, so riddled with meaningless menus and stupefying symbols that people like me can’t decipher, that I would prefer to have a bath in an inflatable paddling pool with live toasters balancing on the rim.

We loaded up and sat in our seats. I switched the engine on and tried to move the car. It refused, like all cars from the Volkswagen Group do to me. I had to play a game of “guess what feature you need to select to move me” with the bloody thing. I got it on the fortieth attempt and we set off through the wide car park towards the exit, with the usual alarmist bleeps telling me there might be a parked car with its bumper sticking out over the line somewhere on this stretch of indoor asphalt.

I put on some music to drown out the risk-averse software’s lamentations, which only made it worse as each time the software found something to moan about, it cut off the music. I stopped the vehicle somewhere about a kilometre from our starting point and looked for the solution. In the end, I managed to convince it to give me the benefit of the doubt, but it insisted on silencing the music when I reversed or there were some overgrown bushes that might lightly brush up against the sides as I negotiated the routes.

Our Volkswagen Škoda Karoq, parked in Liberec city centre

Eventually, I made my way onto the eastbound motorway and took a good look at the same route we took with the taxis back to Prague and out the other side, northwards towards the Krkonoše, North Bohemia’s picturesque mountains straddling the border with Poland. I had done my research of the area and we had enough to fill up the almost two weeks I planned to stay there. By the final day of the holiday, I was convinced we would not have gone to half of the places I spotted, but we would have visited a dozen more that I hadn’t.

On the way we had plenty of time to kill, so I took us all to a spot I had visited with some friends about twelve years earlier. The Prachovské Skály are some of the most breathtaking geological structures in Europe. Formed out of sandstone, these rock formations rise spectacularly out of the hillsides and provide walkers with a number of routes varying in difficulty. There is something for everybody: routes with steep paths and steps, and routes for pushing babies in prams. We took the medium-difficulty route to start with, which brought us out onto a fenced observation point with some incredible views over the surroundings.

   

Dainoris was in his element – he loves such adventures where he can climb rocks, trees, mounds or steps. Milda follows Dainoris around and humours him a little too much, but she kind of knows her limits when it comes to adventurous walking trips. Livia, on the other hand, is completely averse to any form of exercise, and walking up and down slopes, steps, hills and even gentle inclines results in a direct confrontation with us for having led her there. So this particular walk brought her out in protests that would have ruined a day for anyone else. But we’re kind of used to it, so we humoured her and helped her round the course. It was too beautiful to forgo it.

We spent far too long there, and by the time we got back to our car, the sun was heading for the horizon at an alarming pace. I hoped to get to our accommodation while it was still light, although it was an hour’s drive from our position. We arrived with about half an hour of light left, hungry and exhausted. I had called ahead to tell the owner of our house that we would be delayed, but he didn’t mind. He showed us round the place, we unpacked the car, and without a second thought, headed off in search of food.

Our holiday home in Desná

It was after eight in the evening on a Sunday, and many places have already stopped serving food then, but after the fourth phone call to a place, the Hotel Adria in Kořenov, they said they’d hold the kitchen open for us. It was only five minutes up the road so we crammed into our car, which was still in a state of existential anxiety after a drive up some hairpin bends – it has a front grill that looks permanently terrified, so that fits.

I have been telling the children that Czech food is happy food, and the message has got through very well indeed. Dainoris and Livia are big fans of the typical Czech dish of fried breaded cheese, as am I, and Milda has a penchant for dumplings and a decent sauce. I have devoured everything put in front of me, and I have enjoyed rekindling my taste buds after a year eating a lot of the same carrousel of dishes I can make with the limited resources we still have.

Happy food: goulash and dumplings

The next day, Monday 3 August was a blazingly hot day, and Bonny Bee had a lot of translations to fulfil, so I took the children to Harrachov, the nearest ski resort to us further up the mountains close to the Polish border. There are places to swim everywhere and the one in Harrachov had quite a rough bottom, and wasn’t easy to get into, but the children had a ton of fun with their water shooters and the mini pedalos provided there. Later on, I picked their mother up and we returned to Harrachov to eat at a place called Slunce (The Sun). I had a humongous lump of steak followed by a rather decadent blueberry dumpling so big, I reckon the chef had to apply to the council for planning permission to make it.

                             

A delicious, half-eaten fruit dumpling

On Tuesday 4 August, the temperature was in the low thirties, so we decided to find another place to swim, and the tree-lined dammed reservoir at Jablonec and Nisou was a sweet spot. The shaded grassy verges kept Bonny Bee cool whilst we went down to the sandy shore and into the refreshing water. Instantly, Dainoris and Milda found some children to play with – a couple of children with a Czech mother and a British father.

The reservoir at Jablonec Nad Nisou

But Wednesday 5 August was a most important day: that evening we were going to celebrate my birthday at the concert of my favourite band that happened to be playing in a beautiful natural amphitheatre in a village an hour away from us called Křížany. We arrived an hour early and found one of the closest car parking spaces, which was an entirely new experience for me – there had to be a catch…

The venue opened at that time and had provided food and drink in the form of a very long bar and a barbecue with klobása sausages, but unfortunately had not provided a card reader, and I only had 300 crowns (a little more than ten euro) in cash. I asked one of the organisers at the exit where the nearest cash machine was, and was crestfallen to learn it was a six-kilometre drive away. This was the catch, and it came pretty fast.

However…

She called the organiser and told him the situation. This hero beckoned me over to him and once I explained my predicament, pointed me to one of the main coordinators, a young lady called Barbora, who gave me 1200 crowns for a digital deposit. I was thrilled.

Dainoris next to some old rocker

The band soon came out to play – I would have probably missed the beginning and had to park in a place a lot further away, so I felt like Karma was giving me a night off from its usual unremitting and pitiless acts of cruelty. I bought a lot of sausages for us and we went to sit on one of the many benches lined up in semi-circular form around the podium. The children know their music well as I play it regularly in the car, so they were particularly impressed to see and hear them singing live, and even sang along to some of their lyrics, which actually impressed me.

Earlier on in the day, we had visited Liberec Zoo, the oldest one in the country, and in places it definitely showed. Some of the buildings were in essence very evocative of the beginning of the 20th century, and had been designed to demonstrate the fin-de-siècle idea of the people’s palace so evident in places like railway stations or grand hotels and cafés. This one had obviously been gutted by the post-war regime but had since been modernised on a modest budget.

It is quite well designed for humans to observe the animals, but many of the enclosures are pitifully small for such majestic creatures as eagles, zebras and gazelles.

Saying that, I didn’t once meet a member of the zoo’s staff who was over 25 years old, and most seemed to be teenage volunteers or work experience students. One of the more bizarre interactions occurred between me and one of the young “staff”, when she showed the children the horn of a gazelle and said it belonged to a buffalo. If this wasn’t already pretty surreal, she then pointed to a gazelle behind me, insisting it was a buffalo. The thing was no bigger than an adult deer – I even showed her the Google Lens result that concluded it was a gazelle but she was fiercely adamant it was a buffalo to the extent she tried to change the subject. What do I know? I’m just a paying customer…

So Dainoris, again, was in his element – he takes the initiative in most things, although sometimes I think it’s because he knows his sisters are slow in the uptake.

On Thursday 6 August, my birthday, I wanted to take us over the border to Poland. Szklarska Poręba is the closest main town and tourist destination, just fifteen minutes from Harrachov. Expecting something similar to the Czech side, we were flabbergasted to find the place was teeming with people. It resembled a music festival venue but with better toilets. There was no place to park in several of the central car parks, but fortunately enough, about a hundred metres from one of the places we had planned to visit, there were no lines on the ground so I abandoned the car on the side next to the exit and paid through the app.

In Szklarska Poręba, there is a children’s adventure park with several treetop walks of varying difficulties, and we had found a space next to it – most parents would sell their grandmother’s porcelain for such a space and we had found it out of sheer luck. We firstly went to eat at a restaurant with typical dishes of the region, and we started with the usual pierogi as appetisers. Then we moved on to some incredible meats in creamy sauces with pickled beetroot salads and potatoes that melted in the mouth. Milda had a dark-red tongue and insisted on having her photo taken for it.

We headed to the adventure park, which had been highly anticipated, especially for the toboggan run from far up that swooped down and did a loop over the road below. I was damned if I was going to get on that thing. Or at least I had hoped to avoid it at all costs. However, children below 9 years of age had to be accompanied by an adult. If I refused to go with them, there would be a terrible price to pay, and if I did it, I would have to go down with each sibling individually, risking voiding my bowels each time.

After a brief but huge hissy fit by myself, I acquiesced and sat in the toboggan with Milda first. After we got hooked onto a pulley lift to the top, I of course became acutely aware of every single potential obstruction, hazard and death trap on the course we were passing as we slowly rose up the vertiginous slope. As I peered over the side onto those racing inexorably to the bottom, I noticed that the rails were very narrow and leant quite far to one side on curves. There were straight sections that carried excited passengers down long stretches before curling up into new diabolical twists and bends.

At that moment, I remembered the old cartoons of Tom and Jerry when the latter was about to be eaten, launched, dropped or crushed. He would make such a swallowing sound as he gulped and at that moment, just before we reached the summit, that was me.

As I was released from the pulley, I tested the brakes and the accelerator. The brakes caused us to abruptly stop, so that wasn’t going to help when we got to curves, and the open-handed accelerator was saying, “well mate, this isn’t going to make this any nicer.” As we passed the point of no return, Milda emitted a squeal of excitement and I emitted a spoonful of urine. We hurtled down the top part like Emerson Fittipaldi on a hospital dash. Milda was laughing like she was being tickled by a dozen fingers; I on the other hand, was saving my anxiety for the loop over the road, which in the same way we get speeding fines through the post, would surely come no matter how much we desired or wished it to happen.

Then it happened. The ground disappeared and all I could see was the roofs and streets below in what seemed like an hour-long flight over the town but was probably a matter of a few seconds. We cruised into the holding section at the bottom of the course and I sat there for a couple of seconds whispering “never again”. Then Dainoris came over beaming with excitement. Oh boy, round two for me. The second time was a little better, and I managed to cope with the speed, although I still couldn’t cope with the loop over the road and said some very unsavoury things, much to the amusement of everyone below. 

Still, happy birthday to me, eh?

We then witnessed a massive deluge of rain, the only one on our trip, which caused the street to turn into a stream. It was quite impressive but also scary, because it highlights the vulnerability of the area to the weather, which will only get more extreme, despite the number of idiots claiming we’re just experiencing a peak in the earth’s temperature cycle.

The path to Curia Vítkov

Friday 7 August would turn out to be one of those cathartic, purifying and life-affirming days that we have needed for as long as I can remember. I love days when I don’t have to plan anything. I often find they turn out, on average, to serve up more satisfaction than days when we have an itinerary.

The area around Chrastava, a peaceful town of around 6000 inhabitants, contains some peculiarities worth exploring. I drove us an hour or so to the border area around the three-land corner close to Zittau (D) and Bogatynia (PL), where there is a fascinating history project being developed on the top of a hill in the middle of nowhere called Curia Vítkov. The volunteers running this project have built some medieval houses, granaries, and a wooden palace surrounded by gated ramparts and pastoral land as they try to accurately recreate the types of buildings of the period 850 years ago. With such a location, I was able to show Dainoris what the models at Prague Castle represented in reality. He took everything in and I could tell he was able to relate to it all, which was a most satisfying experience. Milda and Livia were interested in the crafts and skills they used to have, such as weaving and stonemasonry.

Curia Vítkov

Curia Vítkov

The man who was there that day had a busy job before but had some burnout issues and wanted a quieter life. The entire team is made up of archaeologists and historians who organise guided school visits with explanations and practical demonstrations of early medieval life. They also host private grill parties and even dance events.

He also gave us the marvellous idea of going to eat at a nearby hotel-restaurant on a farm, called Farma Vysoká. The drive was a little over ten minutes and was well worth it. They have a wellness centre, spa, horses for riding and for show jumping, a feast hall for weddings, a beautiful terrace, garden with children’s playground and views of the mountains, not forgetting a terrific restaurant menu.

Farma Vysoká

Císařský trhanec

The waiting service, like a lot of places in Czechia, was efficient but lacking in warmth. However, as the time wore on, he became quite friendly, and when we actually returned a week later, he was like an uncle. The food was, dare I say it, sublime. I will write a full piece about Czech gastronomy another time, but this was a particular pinnacle worth mentioning here. There are very few restaurants I go to where after a week I still remember what I ate, so this is a pretty big deal.

After a spectacular tomahawk steak on a bed of creamy new potatoes, onions and bacon, I went in for the star of the show, the Císařský trhanec, which is Czech for Kaiserschmarrn, the rich Austrian dessert of thick, ripped up pancake, tossed in powdered sugar and served with jam and in this case a good swirl of cream.

The story of its creation has Eton mess and tarte tatin vibes, and transported me back to my childhood when I was in the Austrian Alps, where the ski instructors came round the room with a huge tray of it on the last night, offering us the chance to pick a piece. As I amusingly sat in about five different places getting as much of it as I could, it also became one of those places where I never forgot what I ate. As I savoured every mouthful of the trhanec, I offered a salute to my distant past.

After this, we took a half-hour drive to Ještěd Golf Course, where there is a children’s forest containing some activities hidden in the trees, including some high swings, a little hut to play in, and amusingly a concrete giant’s head which talks if you walk on it. The sunlight was golden, piercing the trees and casting long shadows on the meadows beyond. Wandering down to the golf course itself, we decided to have a game on their Adventure Golf, a mini golf course on astroturf set between some landscaped rocks and plants.

The talking concrete head at Ještěd Golf Course

We bought the golf balls at the desk, rented the putters, and Milda, Dainoris, Bonny Bee and I went to play. Livia chose to go sit in the children’s playroom where there was a host of toys and figurines to amuse oneself with. To begin with, Milda and Dainoris were quite awkward with their putters, playing between their legs like croquet rather than side-to-side, but as the game wore on Dainoris grasped the idea. Despite this, Milda remained the comedy player, hitting everything everywhere, so at the halfway ninth hole she decided to go and play with Livia.

This was the day we needed. Along with the concert two days earlier, these activities we all did as a family helped us notice things about each other we had not seen before, and find a new way to interact with each other. Dainoris has most definitely matured, enjoying responsibilities and learning how to take charge of tasks and duties. He relishes his role as my wingman, and I plan to build on that. Milda is turning into an erudite and sophisticated talker and she picks up on things with impressive speed. She has shown interest in learning other languages. Livia is still Livia, but her ability to express herself is getting bigger, and she has a sometimes on-point sense of humour.

As the sun set over this idyllic corner of the country, we sat on the terrace of the clubhouse bar and had some evening food and drink while the satisfaction of a perfect day engulfed us, sending us home to sleep.

Saturday 8 August was the exact opposite of the previous few days. Irritable, erratic and suffering from the hangover of an unimprovable day, we drove to Karpacz, a Polish tourist resort a little further away from Szklarska Poręba. Arriving there, you instantly see the difference to the Czech side of the mountains. Karpacz was full. The overflow car parks were heaving, the streets were full of that type of holy cow tourist you usually find in semi-pedestrian zones in cities like Prague and Valencia, but here, they were treating every road like their own living rooms.

The regret etched across our faces, I drove quite far into this town to find a parking space. It’s a linear town, so from one end to the other was a good 5 or 6 kilometres. The centre itself was also problematic – currently being renovated and pedestrianised, the central reservation was off-limits and sealed off by barriers and machinery. I could see the potential of the town, but the state that it was in didn’t bode well for a day when we were already feeling quite tetchy.

I found a parking space in a fairly central location, run by a local hustler, like a lot of the car parks in Polish tourist resorts. We took an angry walk into the construction site that is the town centre and looked for a place to eat. I was furiously trying to find somewhere on my maps while everyone else was listing their grievances: thirsty, bored, tired, not wanting to walk anywhere, the litany of lacking and lethargy lingered long.

I eventually found a place to eat – a decent terrace up some steps at the back of a large inn. We had an angry lunch and went for a walk. The day was sluggish and disjointed, and frayed nerves were on display. Livia had one of her meltdowns and had to be dragged out of the restaurant, and the other two argued with each other. We went for a walk along the main road, trying to recapture our mood. Bonny Bee even started saying she thought the holiday had gone on too long. I was hoping this was a phase, because I’m not spending even less time per year in my happy space.

We found a shaded playground and a chance to calm down. Livia was not enjoying the crowds and was going bananas. I said we should go back to the car and head to Harrachov to get some peace. As we were crossing the road, I heard some music and someone talking quite animatedly on a microphone. Then I noticed the canvas tents and the interactive fountains. At first, Bonny Bee didn’t get my plan, but I said we should take a look.

The interactive fountain in Karpacz

And I'm glad we did, because it was a craft fair. There were stalls selling local honey and fruit jams, as well as wooden cutting boards and hanging features for gardens and home ceilings. But what was the most interesting was the interactive fountain. I told Bonny Bee to let Livia play with it, and it worked – she became more manageable. All three enjoyed it as well as a terific make-it-yourself section. You could, for free, make a crown of flowers, thread some yarn through wooden circles, or make your own jewellery. All three went for the latter, and started threading beads to make bracelets. It changed the complexion of the day completely. The acrid air between us cleared, and the day became that bit more palatable.

Karpacz Craft Fair

Up the hill there is a wooden Norwegian church that had been dismantled piece by piece and moved there. The Wang church was rebuilt on the top of a hill at the upper end of Karpacz. It was quite far out of town and when we got near it, the place was just too full of those holy cows to get anywhere, so we drew a line under that day and drove back to Czechia, stopping at Harrachov for a bite to eat.

Bílý Most (The White Bridge) at Špindlerův Mlýn

Villa Hubertus

On Monday 10 August, after a day at the Jablonec reservoir once more, we decided to take a trip to one of the most popular mountain resorts, Špindlerův Mlýn. Known for being the first settlement on the River Labe (Elbe), its pretty tree-lined riverside park with restaurants and interactive parks acts as a sort of midwife and herald to what this mighty river will become further downstream as it passes Magdeburg, Dresden and Hamburg.

Less than 10 kilometres from Karpacz as the crow flies, the contrast could not have been greater. Parking in a choice of spaces in the centre, we got out of the car and took a wander across one of the bridges, stopping for photos and to peruse my app for places to visit. We found a splendid little restaurant called Villa Hubertus with a terrace overlooking the river and a menu with the prerequisite happy food on it.

With homemade raspberry lemonade on tap, a plate of boar goulash and bread dumplings for me and fried pork in creamy mushroom sauce with potato dumplings for Bonny Bee, we considered the food some of the best we had had on our holiday so far.

Upstream about a kilometre was an adventure park which seemed to satisfy the children’s requests to try out some more daring activities. Walking up the idyllic riverside park evoked memories of the path beside the Saar back in Germany. All the residue of the stresses from the past three years had now firmly perished. Through the trees we heard the sound of action music and as we made it closer, we saw some activities that made Bonny Bee and me recoil in dread.

One of them was a dizzying trapeze-style swing that was hoisted up with one or two occupants on it sixteen metres into the air and released to move back and forth high above the ground. So it came as a surprise, no – a flabbergasting smack on the chops – when both Dainoris and Milda chose enthusiastically to go on it. Getting kitted up for this, they remained bullish but calm. When their turn quickly came around, there were some last adjustments to their hats and they were attached to the swing to be winched to the top of the apparatus ready for release.

As Dainoris and Milda were being pulled up, I asked the organiser to let me know a second before release so I could make a slow-motion video. At her signal I pressed the red button and got footage of their flight. Others who had done this had all let out either a squeal of glee or a scream of fright as they plummeted towards the ground and upwards to the other end of the arc, but not a peep emanated from the pair of them. I wondered if it was pure terror or just the act of taking it all in. After release, they were exhilarated, thrilled, electrified, raving about their experience, which made me so pleased for them, as I would never do such a thing!

There was also a bungee trampoline and all three of them tried that out. Near the end of our visit, Dainoris wanted to try the climbing wall too. While the girls were bungeeing next to him, he sat with his mother for a good half hour while some Kardashian types used up their multiple goes. I was sad for him, sitting there bored and waiting while everyone else was enjoying things. In Ireland, the organiser would probably tell the group to wait a few minutes while Dainoris had his turn, but initiative wasn’t something these people seemed to know how to take.

Afterwards, we walked back through the park by the river. Dainoris and Milda dangled their feet in the Labe and Livia threw some stones in. We just leant on the rail above and took in the outstanding scenery. Once again, like the golf course, we had found a place of contentment in Špindlerův Mlýn. I was sure we’d be back one day, maybe in winter.

EXTRA PHOTOS:

Prachovské Skály, a real highlight

Drinking a lemonade in Harrachov

Liberec Zoo

Meeting Čechomor after the concert

Milda after a beetroot salad in Szklarska Poręba

The meadows around Curia Vítkov

Milda and Dainoris prepare to ascend the trapeze