Tour de the area around Prague (a.k.a. my legs hurt)

I didn´t have work yesterday, so I planned a bike trip in the countryside surrounding Prague. It was a very long and hilly affair, but I enjoyed it immensely. I plotted a route on the czech version of mapquest that took me to two castles and two interesting cities and was about 100 km long. Being the foolhardy kid that I am, and full-well knowing better, I neglected to buy a map and it was only once I realized that I had merged onto the wrong highway/"highspeed roaday" and was now in effect doing the entire loop backwards that I bought one. A pleasant day of alternately internally bitching about the arduousness of hills, zooming down winding downhills, and every five minutes thinking "holy crap this world is beautiful" ensued.


The first bloom in a field of sunflowers

Coming into a typical village

Whee! A big castle! (the most famous one in the Czech republic, longterm residence of Charles IV etc)

Why not bring back something home for the kiddies? Say, a pair of brass knuckles or a ninja throwing star (a real, razorsharp one...)

Such is the image of a typical country road. Highways are still fairly rare, since there are small villages very nearby and it wouldn't make sense to keep merging and unmerging etc, so this is what people drive on to get anywhere. At some point someone decided to plant trees along all the country roads, so most of the stretches have either apple or cherry trees alongside them, and you can eat the fruit, provided you don't mind that it might eventually give you cancer from the exhaust fumes, which I don't. Typical irresponsibility of youth, I know.

Main lesson of the day-Invest in maps. Prague is big. I realized this when I rode into Černošice, which is technically in the jurisdiction of Prague but very far away from my quarter, so in effect I added another 20 km to my already significant 100 km. At or around the moment of this realization, it started raining. Not drizzling, not spitting, more like a the-gods-coming-down-from-Vallhalla thunderstorm downpour. The picture doesn't do it justice. So I rode another fifteen miles in the rain in the shoulder alongside the cars, singing songs from Juno to keep myself company. And you know what? It was fun! Coming through the centre I passed another cyclist who had a wide grin on his face. Maybe he just proposed to his girlfriend, maybe he got promoted at work, but I like to think that he was reveling in the thunderstorm too.

This morning my intent was to go run, but my body informed me, loudly, that I had just biked 120 km, was in significant pain, had slept ten hours and could have slept more, and my intent could go bother someone else. So I went back to bed. Cheers.

Sorry for the long post, I need to curtail my rambling.