So another four day week-end (May 5-8). It seems they keep planning the holidays on Tuesday here so you get off Monday too. (kind of like US holidays observed on Monday, only better.) This time the occasion is VE, Victory in Europe Day, the end of WWII as I’m told here.

So we were to join the Czech biking group for a week-end in a cabin they rented in the north of the country in the Jizerské mountains about an hour and a half away, not to far from my Ještěd post from this past winter. We were actually touch-and-go all week as it looked like a week-end full of crappy rainy weather. And I was a bit reluctant to spend 4 days cooped up inside with a bunch of Czechs who don’t speak much English. Towards the end of the week it looked like it might break, so we figured we could head out on Sunday.

Sure enough, the week-end started off rainy, but it began to clear as we drove out of Prague. We called to see where our friends were as we arrived, and not surprisingly they were in a local bar drinking. They had gone on a ride and were retreating from the rain when we showed up. We joined them for the last beer then headed up the hill to the cabin. As everyone else dried and cleaned off, Verča and I put on our bicycle costumes to go for a ride, taking advantage of a short burst of clear weather. We headed off for a short 35km ride through the surrounding hills.

The first thing I noticed in this region was ski lifts, we passed a number of them, strangely it seemed like we would keep riding from the bottom to the top of them on some inexplicably steep hill. (read: ski slope) We did ride down one as I recall too. The area definitely is pretty and would be a fun area to ski-bum around in the winter. Again no surprise, it started to mist then rain a bit. It was mostly warm enough, so no big deal. We did stop at a lodge/bar about 2/3 of the way in and had a nice hot cup of tea before we were off again for a good bit of downhill. Verča took me to some big lake and then down some hill that she had told me about before. Just a long double track downhill (but the story I had heard was when she was riding here with two girlfriends and Verča made a wrong turn and made them climb this gravely 3 km slog.) Of course the hill dumped us into another pretty (though worn-looking) little village, with a km of paved climb out of it at some ungodly steep slope.

It evened out a bit, then up someone’s dirt driveway, then up another ski slope, then up a sick steep washed out dirt double track. Verča was definitely happy when we knew the climb was over. Over the peak and it was 3km of technical rutted, rocky, and rooty singletrack back to the field above our cabin. There were a couple of cool rock drops and rock gardens so I gave Verča the camera and played for a minute.

That’s what I get for ‘trying it again for the camera’ after Verča missed my first and second flawless attempts, Oh well. The weather had let up and we had a nice misty mountain view as we rolled back down.

We dashed inside and warmed ourselves with some new beer from a local brewery and chatted into the evening by the outdoor grill. I stayed up late with a couple of drunk Czechs after Verča gave up playing cards, learning a czech version of the card game asshole, played with some cryptic weird pinochle -type deck. The funniest part playing drinking games with Czechs is that no one gets punished for playing poorly, everyone just gets drunk anyway; win or lose. A few more beers later and I ended up teaching them gin and rummy (with normal cards) cause I was tired of trying to decipher their weird cards with acorns, leaves and such, and there was a drunk girl still at the table willing to translate rules to those sober enough to care.