The end of yesterday’s trip to Navsi, where I then walked through Jablunkov and in Pisek I turned off towards Komorovsky Grun (732 m a.s.l.).
I got scared, I didn’t know where to go. Going forward was impossible, there was no fence, and I didn’t want to start drafting my epitaph in a hurry. I could have gone back a little, but that would only have taken me to Mosty. Going back the other way would have taken me to Slovakia and to the right into Poland; I was almost at the tripoint. Neither option was on the table, so I decided to walk the whole route again.
I’m walking and suddenly I hear the rustle of snow giving way behind me. I turn around and there’s that fighting dog that went for me near the Girova chalet about 5 months ago. I broke into a cold sweat, my head started spinning, and I realized how insignificant I was. A moment later its owner came running after the dog, saying only “don’t worry, I’m with him“.
The beast and my first encounter with it, when it lunged at me; my hands were shaking terribly, but luckily its owner led it away
I don’t know whether it remembers me, probably yes; I recognized it in a millisecond. Some kind of Rottweiler or whatever it is, skinny as a rake, but it makes up for it in height. Back then I started shouting and its owner came, but he walked as if he barely had any lungs; those few steps took him an eternity. Then I turn around again: the Girova chalet and its restaurant were closed, even though they should have been open for about another 20 minutes. I needed to eat, so I keep going and don’t pass up the Polanka Restaurant, where I ask whether I can pay by card. You can, but only for 200 CZK and up.
The menu fit on 2 pages, and the prices seemed really affordable to me, for example potato dumplings with sheep cheese, 300g for 69 CZK. In the end I had trout with potatoes (200g), vegetable soup and 0.3 l of Kofola. It really seemed very cheap; for example, at the pizzeria and restaurant at Martin’s in Reka I paid 350 CZK for trout and a drink, here 210 CZK.
Then I ask whether I could stay the night and how much it would cost; they said yes, for 410 CZK a night. That was the lowest possible price, and probably without breakfast too. It didn’t seem that expensive to me, but I told myself I’d try to walk the unknown route and see how it goes. Off I go. Since there were a lot of dogs there, many only on a chain, wolfhounds and so on, I didn’t want to go back there today, and certainly not in the dark. So I headed towards Jablunkov-Lyski, where there was the cache “Jablunkov Lyski-Kaplicka“.
I know the Girova chalet is somewhere nearby, I’m walking on snow, it’s crunching underfoot, a dog starts howling. The path is gravel almost the whole way, and I lit it with the LED on my Xperia. I get to the chapel and find out it’s all ploughed up as if by a Zetor (here comes the Zetor, heading for the hills…:)) and in my low shoes I didn’t feel like venturing into trenches and rougher terrain, mainly because of the night and the darkness. After that, all I could picture was my bed; the second-to-last local train was leaving shortly, so I had no choice but to run the last roughly 1.5 km.
It didn’t help me one bit anyway. I rush into the station in Navsi and go to platform 1, where I see a train, which means I hadn’t gone through the underpass where the Village Elephant always arrives. I find out it’s a RegioJet 😀 I look like an ostrich, and the train left literally right in front of my nose anyway. Luckily the waiting room was open and heated, so I wasn’t freezing outside.
👻 This address is now just an empty mailbox.
👻 The website closed up shop and took down the sign too.
👻 This page has gone to the eternal hunting grounds of the internet.