17 June ’04. Thursday. We had the longest walk to the showers and potty this morning…. That will never happen again if I can help it. Anyway, it was one of the coldest nights that we have had since starting our journey and we were looking for extra blankets (can you believe we couldn’t find them…). It must have been a front that brought all that cold in. Today was quite nice all day long (Thank You Lord). We had breakfast looking out over the lake this morning and it was warm even then. After doing the dishes we went into town for our first visit to a Czech town. One of the first things that had to be accomplished this morning was to get some Koruna’s (Czech money 30 Kc = 1 Euro). Cheb has a population of about 30,000 and all the main town area was very quite all day. We went looking for the Tourist Information Center to get up to date maps and find out what was going on in the area that we might be interested in seeing and doing. This is always a good way to get started in a new area. I love the architecture of the buildings and the soft pastel colors that each is painted.
We also visited the Dom (St Niklas’) and tried to get into a couple of other churches but they were closed. There is a wonderful castle that was founded by Freidrich Barbarossa. It sits right on the banks of the river. An original Romanesque fortification. It houses the “Black Tower of Cheb”, St Erhards and St Urlulas Chapels.
This town isn’t really on the tourist maps so there were very few people to see this beautiful structures but we were very impressed. After we got back to camp we met with Adrian and Gerda for a beer and exchange our stories of the day.
They have a motorcycle that they use to get around in the more remote areas and today was one of them. Gerda was telling us of a place just 6 km north that they had discovered this afternoon. She got us both excited to see it so…. Tomorrow…Františkovy Láznì