Sit-down, full-service breakfast? This place kept getting better.
Euro breakfast.
After breakfast, we paid and thanked our gracious hosts. I asked the owner what the bottles of liquor sitting behind the counter were; she explained to me "local" and "alcohol." I had gathered that much, but she got down a 0.1 L bottle and gave it to us as a souvenir. We saved it for a toast upon our safe return to Budapest and found it quite like Southern Comfort.
We hopped back in the Ocatavia and hit the road. As a whole, Europe seems not so big on street signs. Our hamlet was no exception, and even the best Google Maps directions will only get you so far without any point of reference. After a few lucky guesses, we managed to get to the highway, and from there the driving was easy. We got to Tábor roughly on schedule, around 9:30, a full hour-and-a-half before the Women's start. Parking seemed shockingly disorganized for a World Championships. We parked in a strip mall's parking lot, just across the street from the race course. Getting our car towed was among the lowest items on the day's To Do list, so we asked some Czechs who had just pulled in if they spoke English or German, and after two successive negatives, managed to convey the question "Is this parking really free?" without real language. "Free." and a head nod confirmed. I noticed the same thing at the grocery store right next to the course -- no one was taking money, just a police officer there to direct traffic. Extorting sports fans for event parking must be uniquely American.
We hit up the grocery store for snacks and an ATM before buying our tickets. Heading out, we noticed a group of old guys passing a bottle and a glass right in front of the grocery store, taking shots. Free parking, no open container laws, and no restrictions on outside food/drink at the race -- this was a distinctly European championships indeed.
Excited for the race
Given the freezing conditions (Czech Republic had been in a cold snap for the weeks leading up to the race, leaving the course frozen and covered in snow) and our inherently-macho/dumb American nature, chest-painting was a must.
The Brits next to us decreed us "bloody wankers" and rightly marked this as dumb in an American way. Friendly guys actually.
The races got underway, and we watched from several locations around the course. The race followed a loop of several kilometers, which the racers covered about 10 times. Below are some of the notable snaps, feel free to check out my complete set at http://picasaweb.google.com/GMarcil/CzechTrip#. First up was the women's race.
Marrianne Vos (Netherlands) was in a league of her own and looked easy winning solo.
The hometown hero, Katerina Nash, mustered a 4th place finish.
Hungary had one competitor in the women's race.
Tough cornering on ice and slush, bunched early in the race
Czech Champion Zdenek Stybar delights the crowd with a solo attack. Stybar held his advantage to win by a good margin. Here, he's carrying his bike immediately after the stairs (one set of several on the course).
Francis Mourey (5th) and the thousand-mile stare
Timothy Johnson (14th, first American) sliding through the turn
Before leaving, we stopped in again at the grocery store for lunch and snack food. Neal and I made a trip through the store to pick up snacks and noticed that beer was alarmingly cheap (8 or 9 CZK or ~0.50 USD for a .5 L beer) and, from our experience at Paradise Club, better than what they served in Budapest. Naturally, we pooled our remaining change and tried to spend every last koruna on beer. Browsing the beer aisle, a local man identified us as foreign and with great gusto directed us to look no further than "Gambrinus!!" We grabbed a mix and figured eight beers would be conservative enough to just barely undershoot our remaining 92 koruna, but we got stuck with a 3 koruna deposit on each bottle. We asked the cashier if we could take one bottle off the purchase, which involved calling a supervisor over to override the register and hit a few codes. After this production, we packed up quickly, but not before an enthusiastic German man tapped me on the shoulder to ask if I spoke deutsch. I answered no, but pointed to Neal, who he told to wait a moment. He pointed the cashier to the beer she had just taken off our bill, had her ring it up on his check, and handed it to us with a great smile on his face. Neal and I found this hilarious and thanked him warmly; I suppose a jettisoned beer was too great a tragedy for him to allow.
Our drive back to Budapest went considerably better than our drive on the way up. Tábor was slightly closer to roads that landed us on a fairly straight shot through Brno and Bratislava, plus I was getting well-accustomed to driving on European highways. The only event of note on the drive back was ridiculous driving on the part of locals. I kept a steady 130-140 kph all the way, but about 30 k out from the city another car passed us so fast it seemed that he was driving at highway speeds while we were merely stopped. Passed us like shook-our-car fast. 200 kph at the very least; we were all too shocked for speech. Driving in the city with traffic, however, was probably the toughest and least-enjoyable part of the trip. Budapest drivers are kind of crazy to begin with, and the city's plethora of one-ways and no-left-turn intersections only compound this madness. I won't divulge how many times I stalled the car.
We returned to Budapest to find an enormous deposit of snow: just as the previous snow had melted off, it was replaced by an unexpected weekend snowfall of five or six inches. Snow in the city is nothing like snow in the 'burbs... all you can look forward to is a week or so worth of icy, inky brown sludge coating the sidewalks. I now understand so well why northern US towns have codes about shoveling/salting your sidewalks (being from the South, the need to take care of this at all always struck me as a little odd). Anyhow, the trip was amazing, and we pulled it off pretty cheap -- about $170 a head. Next up on the travel list: Prague to visit Jordan and Northern Austria for hamlet exploring.
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