Ingrid and Malcolm's Life in Luxembourg: Czech Republic

We are finally getting around to writing about our amazing week in the Czech Republic. The day after Mike and Pat left we headed off on the backroads towards Brno in South Moravia (southeast Czech), stopping in little towns on the way. Crossing the border was an experience with lots of cheap stalls set up along the roads. Once we got through the border town the countryside became a whole lot prettier.

We stayed in Brno for a couple of nights, on the way passing the Moto Grand Prix circuit, much to Malcolm's delight. We stayed in the old centre of the city which was full of beautiful architecture and a castle founded in the 1200s that was used as a military fortress in the 18th and 19th century and opened again by the Germans in WWII. We had an amazing dinner at a beautiful silver service restaurant that cost about the same as an average meal in Munich or Perth.

From here we headed south. We visited Austerlitz where Napoleon defeated the combined forces of Austria and Russia. The château where the treaty was signed was beautiful and in its grounds was a golf course! We saw many golf courses in Czech and want to go back some time and play a few.

We then headed to the wine region and stopped off at Palace Valtice where we went to the National Salon of Czech Republic Wines which is in the long cellars of the palace. Each year they judge the top 100 wines of Czech and we got to taste them! It was very well set out and we have convinced the maths dept that it would be a great place for us to go.

We travelled along the Czech Austrian border towards South Bohemia and saw many châteaus/castles that had been left after the war when Czech became a communist country. We also saw lots of evidence of where the Iron Curtain had been along the border where the machine gun posts were still in use up to 1989.

Our next stop was Ceske Budejovice another extremely pretty town with a large piazza. With sunshine and daylight saving we spent hours just wandering around.

Next off to Ceske Krumlov which is an extremely popular day trip from Prague. This was the first place where we saw many tourists and the first place we heard a lot of English, elsewhere we had to get by on Malcolm's German. It was a beautiful town enclosed in a river's arc with a castle overlooking it. We finally got to do a tour of a castle in English - one good thing about there being so many tourists.