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Today was a lovely day. The weather was fantastic. A perfect blue sky day. Our tour guide told us that he specially ordered the weather for us with a couple of sacrifices. We started off the day with a lovely breakfast of the typical local fare. Bread and cheese and ham 😊 The first order of the day was a wee bike ride through the hills behind of Cesky Krumlov. This was an absolutely beautiful thing to do. The only problem with the ride was the fact that there were not enough hills. Going up the hills I mean. Instead they took us up to the top of the hills in a van and then basically all we had to do was free wheel our way back to the village. Totally understandable for the people on the trip who are not used to cycling, however I could have done with a few more hills.
On the cycled ride poor old Stuart managed to do a superman impression and flew over his handle bars landing on the slightly rocky surface. At the same time he managed to knock the chain off his bike and of course ended up with some scrapes
and bruises.
After the bike ride we headed off to the Cesky Krumlov castle to do some cultural things before we headed back into the sunshine to do some rafting. The castle complex of Cesky Krumlov is the second biggest in the Czech Republic after the castle in Prague. However unlike the castle in Prague this castle is in much better condition in terms of the interior and has a lot of the original furnishings still in place. We did a tour through the interior of the castle with a lovely little girl as our tour leader (she was tiny!) It was actually her first tour in english, but she did very very well. The castle was quite interesting to wander through. Just before the tour we walked up the tower and got a lovely view of the town of Cesky Krumlov, although I have to say that it was a little chilly up the top of the tower.
In the tour of the castle probably the most beautiful thing that we saw was the last room on the trip, which was the ballroom/theatre room. This has been painted in the most amazing Rococo style by a Viennese
artist. Apparently he managed to paint the entire room, with only a couple of assistants to help him, in one year. Pretty impressive.
After we had completed our castle tour we scurried back to the hotel so that we could get changed into our togs for the rafting trip. There is a standard rafting tour that goes through the town of Cesky Krumlov, which obviously has a river running through it, but instead we decided to do the longer 3 hour rafting trip. This was so much fun. We all had a total blast. There was quite a bit of splashing the other raft, and Diver Dave decided ( quite a few times) that the best thing to do was to jump between the rafts whenever they got close to each other. Obviously this nearly capsized the rafts each time and we all got very wet. Luckily we all had a good portion of alcohol to keep us warm, if not dry. There were also a couple of pubs along the way, that we obviously had to stop at 😊 I got laughed at a little bit as everybody else brought beer onto the rafts, but I took champange
(mostly because I just don't drink beer). However this turned out to be an inspired choice when Rachel's beer kept spilling over but my champagne bottle didn't move and inch.
Upon our return from the rafting tour we headed off to the local vegeterian restaurant for dinner, mostly in order to get a bit of a break from the solid menu of meat that we have been enjoying for the last few days, and then of course we had to head next door to get another sampling of the fantastic local mead. Tomorrow we head off for the brights lights and big city of Prague.
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