Ljubjana was nice, pretty green and with a cultured coffeehouse feel to it, I thought. We stayed in Hostel Cecilia there, near the bus station. The hostel was a converted jail, very swank, bordering on a little too yupped-up and artsy for travelers, truth be told. We weren't intending to stay long, however, and we were looking for something a bit more exotic, so we moved on to Croatia by train after only one night there.

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Cesky Krumlov was exactly what we needed after Prague. A picture-postcard medieval town with the lazy Vltava River meandering through and the fantastic Krumlov Castle, with its bear pits, towering above cobbled streets and ancient buildings. We stayed in the Hostel Havana, which was virtually empty, and met a couple of cool Aussies and Canadians to hang with.

Though Cesky Krumlov was beautiful and exactly the decompression venue we both needed, Mags and I decided to move on after a couple of days, keeping our limited timeline in line. We took a minibus over the hills to Austria, a beautiful drive, then trains on to Ljubjana. Here Mags waits for the bus to Austria.

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Prague was outstanding. The buildings were beautiful and had an indescribable ancient feel to them, and we arrived during a huge music festival, so even the buskers on the street were exceptional musicians. We had planned to go to a show or two in churches, but seemed to always miss them, mired in the heat and unwilling to leave our relatively cool hostel siestas. The heat wave was completely unreasonable and pretty unexpected.

We both found our hostel good for meeting people. We went out with a large crowd--a mix of Canadian, British, Kiwi, and American travelers--to a club called La Lucerne, where we drank cheap (really cheap) beer and danced like retards to 80's music videos. The whole of eastern Europe is stuck in the 80's. I can't tell you how many times I heard "The Final Countdown," or "The Winds of Change" on this trip, though I guess I can forgive anybody who grew up under communism for listening to the latter.

But eventually we tired of the heatwave, and of the crowds on the Karlovy Most, so we decided to move on to Cesky Krumlov, a UNESCO-site town in the south of Czech, which had been spoken highly of by fellow travelers in the hostel.

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After briefly reviewing our options--

"Let's go east!"
"Uh, Ok!"
"Mmmkay. What's east?"
"Prague's east. Let's go to Prague"
"Ok. We're going to Prague!"

--we went to Prague. We caught second-class tickets on a night train out of western Europe and tried to move as little as possible in the nearly unbearable heat until the train got up to speed. We were joined in our cabin by a squat German couple who spoke so little English (i.e. none) that I wondered if our cultural penetration was less than reported. They cracked open a couple of beers, sat back, chatted with each other, then unzipped a previously-unnoticed little bag, whereupon a scraggly ugly little dog leapt out and attacked Maggie. I think she had been missing our parents' pups, as she didn't seem to mind.

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Thursday, May 26: After months of painstaking planning and anticipation, packing and agonizing over details, I set out from Portland with nothing more than the pack on my back and the knowledge that I was flying to Frankfurt, which was apparently somewhere in Germany. Actually, I hadn't planned at all, and that was intentional; my sister, Maggie, and I had corresponded only briefly on the phone about where we were going to meet up and what we would do, which we thought would be the fun way to travel. Happy-go-lucky, seat-of-your-pants, fly-by-night, and other-hyphenated-expressions would be our Modus Operandi. In other words, the night before I left, I tossed three shirts, some boxers and socks, a couple of cameras, and my brand new (and brick-like) copy of The Lonely Planet Guide to Europe on a Shoestring into my daypack. I was definitely going to be traveling light, I decided.

My housemate Dan generously gave me a ride to the airport when it was time to go. I think he was glad to get the house to himself for a month. The heat that day was out-of-control, and the little prop airplane I took to Vancouver was apparently not equipped with AC, so it was swelteringly hot. From Vancouver, where a nice old Canadian couple in line to check in to British Airways was convinced that I was going to return from this trip married, I flew to Heathrow, and thence on to Frankfurt.

At Frankfurt, Mags met me looking tanned, hale, and healthy, after a semester in the Spanish hinterland of Seville. It became immediately obvious that she was going to be my guide for some time on this safari, at least until I got my bearings. She's an experienced traveler and seemed completely at ease with people chattering about in strange languages (and, yes, German is a strange language).



Mags also seemed to have gone cross-eyed after so much traveling, and to have developed some sort of disability involving voluntary control of the tongue. Fortunately, this led strangers to hand her money on the street, and it went away after a few days.

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