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So Verča and I were going to go hiking in the High Tatras, a mountain range on the border between Poland and the Slovak Republic, the eastern most range of the Alps. It’s about a 8hr bus or train ride away, but with a 3-day week-end for Czech National day, we were all about it. But we kept abreast of the weather, as we readied to depart and it looked pretty crappy. So last minute we nixed it.

We weren’t about to endure a long journey to be stuck in the rain like 2 weeks ago. And we sure as hell weren’t going to go all out and summit the 2600m peak there on a hardcore dayhike where we couldn’t see a thing from inside a cloud. Anyway we scrapped that idea and decided to try later.

We stayed in Prague and decided to paint our apartment. It is now a sunny yellow-orange from the floor to 7′ up, then white, with some red accents and a couple of small red walls. (see the pivo post for the wall color.) Almost needless to say it is a huge improvement, and will be quite welcome as the length of daylight has begun to diminish here. Again surprising to no one but us, it took along time to do what with all the patch and repair of the plaster we had to do along the way. A day and a half later we were happy as the weather began to clear and we ventured back outside.

We found a cool new walk through the city with some shady places to ride, involving crossing an active train yard that we had a hard time finding our way out of, and enjoyed the end of a long day. Having been cooped up we resolved to go biking on Sunday. We were going to look at going to a bike park on the German border so Verča could try out a little downhill stuff and work on here big hit confidence.

We woke up on Sunday slowly, had a nice breakfast and balked at the price of rentals and lift passes at the park in Germany, and the Czech one had already closed for the year. We were being lazy and had settled on riding around Prague, when one of our friends called.

Matsa was in Ještěd, (you all remember the spaceship thing, right?) for the last week-end of lift served trails there, and they were renting some all-mountain bikes. We hopped in the car and were off. For $30 we rented 2 high quality czech branded taiwanese 6″ 35lb squishy pieces of crap and vowed to do what we could to work them over. This wouldn’t be hard as we waited for the lift and I realized that Verča’s no-name rear hub was probably going to explode in about 4 hours.

But lucky for us we only had just over 2 1/2 hours left of the downhill season on some seriously wet and muddy trails.

There were lots of roots and a couple of nicely built stunts. Overall it wasn’t nearly as techy as the stuff in the shed, but had some nice flowing step down North Shore bits, and some well crafted and placed jumps and drops. It was tight and twisty and would have been overkill with a real DH bike, so our rental turds were perfect.

We had a blast. Verča rode some sweet steep stuff and hit a couple of jumps. And she was definitely stoked to ride the long (and wide) boardwalk since she gets a bit afeared of them usually. It was nice to haul ass on some slippery stuff and hit some nice little jumps for me too. It is always nice to pass people when you are riding a cheapo rental too. And Verča was reassured to see that she was much more in control than a number of guys out there with some spendy equipment and she was willing to try and at least roll almost every drop.

Plus at the end of the day we dropped the muddy bikes of back at the rental shop, put on clean clothes and jetted.
It’s nice to let someone else clean the bike every once in a while.
Go ride your bike!
-C&V