From Prague to Nuremberg
Hotel St Augustine in Prague
After packing up and leaving our lovely hotel in Prague, we headed west toward Germany to meet our cruise ship in Nuremberg. Our guide stayed with us to show us around the spa town of Karlovy Vary, also in the Czech Republic. It is home to several hot springs and cold winters! The little town has a large Russian population. Apparently Peter the Great visited the town, returned to the motherland and bragged about what a beautiful town it was with its healing hot springs. After that, Russians began to come to the town and eventually many moved here.
The town follows the river, with hotels, shops and restaurants lining both banks.
All over the town are little kiosks where you can purchase for roughly 45 cents one of their famous spa wafers. It tastes a lot like those little waffle wafers at home that have the white cream center. How good the wafer is depends mainly on how hungry you are.
The thermal springs are all over the town. This one, inside a building, shoots naturally several feet into the air. We were told by our guide to purchase an inexpensive little porcelain pitcher like the ones below.
Then as you walk through the town, you can stop at one of the springs, fill your cup and taste the water or even drink large quantities of it for its medicinal strengths. Having several physicians along came in handy as one reminded us that the water probably had a lot of magnesium in it (as in Phillips Milk Of) and that I might not want to drink too much of it since we still had about three hours on the van to Nuremberg. No worries about that though....the water was not very good.
For lunch we had a pizza at this little restaurant on the right. The crust was really thin and it was good!
The town had several very lovely green spaces.
On the way to Nuremberg we stopped at a gas station for a restroom break where I loved looking all the different kinds of candy and soda. I noticed that an Oreo is an Oreo...even in Germany.
We drove on the autobahn where buses have speed limits but cars do not. I noticed lots of Audis, Volkswagens, and BMWs flying past us...and I mean flying! The countryside was absolutely gorgeous...the greenest fields of new wheat and bright yellow fields of canola (you can see the canola in the distance in this photo) and dotted among them were old white farmhouses with red roofs, one with smoke coming out of the chimney. I couldn't soak it up fast enough.
GLORY be to God for dappled things—
For skies of
couple-colour as a brinded cow....
Gerard Manley Hopkins
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