Country Driving - Orlík

Mary interupted our lazy Saturday morning with a great suggestion: rent a car and drive off to South Bohemia for the day. We have talked about taking day or weekend drives outside of Prague, especially when the hot summer weather and bigger crowds remind us that Spring and Autumn are the best times to enjoy the many great sites within Prague. However, despite our ideas we had not yet explored anywhere in the Czech Republic outside of Prague.

We rushed around to get a car rented. The one place we had rented from before didn't answer their office door so we paid a bit extra to go to another place but set off just after mid-day. Since we don't own a car now it was a treat for us to be in the car. We had a destination, the chateaux at Orlík, but we had set the TomTom (our new GPS toy) to a location further south and realized we were taking a less than a direct route. This turned out to be exactly what we had hoped for though as we ended up driving through a beautiful mix of forests and farmland with a number of very small towns in between. At point the small road we had been following came to a sudden end, with a barricade blocking the entire width. To the left there was a narrow road so we continued on. Quickly that narrow road became even narrower to the point that the hay growing on the sides of the road were as tall as the car and brushing the sides of the car. The best part was that the TomTom didn't recognize our road but adjusted our route to have us continue on what appeared as a dotted line through an empty stretch of land before intersecting back with our intended path. The road turned to dirt before merging back on the "main" road and we continued to Orlík.

Just before our arrival there we came up a bridge high up over the Vltava river. We stopped and walked out on the sidewalk with girls. It was incredibly windy but we had a great view down over the river and the boats below so the girls really enjoyed that. We arrived at the chateaux and began walking around. It was certainly not the most impressive of all chateaux or castle but it was a nice sight. The tour of the chateaux was 50 minutes which we knew would be too long for the girls so we spent most of our time just walking around the outside of the chateaux. The land it sits on juts out into the water in a beautiful setting. The river is dammed so the chateaux sits just above the water where in the past it was perched high up and likely a very impressive site. The girls had a great time walking around, playing on the narrow paths, or just sitting on the grass in the shade below the castle eating blueberries. We finished our trip with ice creams and drove back to Prague. It was great to have broken the ice on our Czech countryside day trips and we know now that there will be a number of these types of trips this spring. A great day for all.