Better a Living Brewery than a Dead Castle!

That's the slogan of the town we're currently in, Znojmo, where they've turned the town's medeival fortress into a brewery for the local Hostan beer.

To catch everyone up, we've now been following more or less the "official" Prague-Vienna Greenway route since we left Tábor and are steadily making progress towards our goal of Vienna. The first couple of days out of Tábor were exceedingly beautiful but also very taxing on the legs since we were traversing Czech Canada, a region of forests and hills that is very popular with cyclists. We alternated cycling and rest days to give our bodies a chance to recuperate and so spent a day each in Jindichuv Hradec and Slavonice, both charming and historic towns. We stayed in a nice penzion right next to the main museum in Jindichuv Hradec and a hotel on the main square in Slavonice. The latter town is quite an artistic hub with many galleries and "do-it-yourself" pottery and craft shops. In a couple of towns we have seen these portable movie theaters present, where they park a trailer with projecters right in town, raise a portable screen and show movies to the locals for a small charge (and also sell beer). We were very lucky to catch an ENGLISH screening (with Czech subtitles) of the new Indiana Jones movie in Slavonice. This is the first English language media we've seen in quite some time and was very welcome. It was especially interesting seeing it here because of the Russian/communist plot of the movie.

Since Slavonice the terrain has flattened out a bit into more rolling farmland and so we are able to make a little better time. It is very hot, though, so we have to pace ourselves. Luckily, the Czechs long ago planted trees along the rural roads, presumably to provide shade to people like ourselves while in transit. We next reached a stunning village of Vranov nad Djie, which has an impressive castle perched high on the cliffs above town. Unfortunately my camera batteries died just as we reached the castle and my Czech replacements didn't work at all. I later located some new batteries and got one shot of the castle as we left town. The route from Vranov to Znojmo was fairly short and flat, other than the initial climb out of the river gorge. We elected to take a "shortcut" through the national forest, which proved to be a brutally steep mountain bike trail up out of the gorge. Even though we walked up it we were feeling the pain. Don't forget that we each have probably 30-40 lbs on our back.

We've been biking every day now since leaving Slavonice and intend to still try to reach Vienna under our own power. We should only have 2-1/2 to 3 biking days left to get there which leaves us a couple of days extra to reach Vienna by Tuesday or so (we fly out on Wednesday).

-Mike