In the morning my mom was the first to wake me, as early as 5 a.m. It wasn’t really necessary to wake me, because last night I practically never fell into a deep sleep. And that’s even though I went to bed at 1 a.m., because when I first tried at 9:30 p.m. I couldn’t fall asleep for the life of me. I tossed and turned without a single yawn, without a single signal from my body that it was tired. I lay there like that until 11 p.m., then called Vosmrnda, went off to do some programming, and 2 hours later I tried again, this time with the window open.
The combination of all this meant I fell asleep before long. So to sum up, I slept 4 hours, and even then in such a state that if a little mouse had walked past me, I would have noticed it – every sense except sight was on edge. No wonder, then, that when they woke me in the morning I didn’t want to leave my warm little nest. After half an hour, during which little Vosmrnda kept pulling “cat stunts” trying to make me get up so he would get his food pouch, I decided it would be better to get up than to keep distracting him from his antics.
Although I had packed everything the day before, today I just put it all into 1 bag and could set off on a long journey to see a person very dear to my heart. I didn’t get much done in the morning, exhaustion and grogginess are a “pain” – I only fixed something and then finished the listing of all the youth members in the DB. An hour flew by like a minute and my dad was already in the Transit, because he was going to some market with my sister. As I left the house, my sister was still in the cellar looking for some plastic pen. In the end she brought it and shortly before 7 a.m. we set off.
Dad dropped me off at Billa and I trudged over to platform 2. At first I started to panic, it didn’t occur to me at all that an IC train isn’t an Ex, or rather that I was taking an Ex, but as soon as the RegioJet arrived, everything was clear to me. And I had already been glad that my train would go through Havirov and not through undermined Karvina. Sadly I no longer know why I panicked so much, probably because I was counting on my train leaving at 7:24 and the RegioJet was already leaving at 7:16. But both the RegioJet and my train had a slight “speed-up” or arrived exactly on time, including time for getting off and on, because we stuck firmly to the timetable.
I don’t know why, but once again, at least for the second time, maybe the third time I’ve gone to Prague, I got into the second carriage. I don’t know what the other carriages looked like, but this one was almost like something from the future. There were 230V sockets at every seat, the carriage was also quiet, the seats looked luxurious, simply awesome. I was surprised that this carriage didn’t require a seat reservation, that was probably only the standard, much older compartments.
I swapped the SIM cards in my phones, namely I put the Vodafone SIM into the Nokia 101, so I would stay reachable longer and not keep fiddling with the phones. I had them all switched off, since I knew I might have a very long wait in Prague, which I would pass with geocaches, and for that I need GPS. I started reading the Bible but didn’t understand much of it, so I closed it before Bohumin. It wouldn’t have “worked” afterwards anyway, because the train was packed to bursting. For most of the time 3 young ladies sat with me, which I watched in total disbelief. But let’s take it one step at a time.
Maybe I’ll forget someone, maybe I’ll leave someone out. In Bohumin an older gentleman sat down next to me – let’s call him man1, so we can tell them apart. To make it clearer for me, and for you too, here are the stations where this train stopped from Tesin to Prague:
- Cesky Tesin
- Karvina main station
- Bohumin
- Ostrava main station
- Ostrava-Svinov
- Hranice na Morave
- Olomouc main station
- Zabreh na Morave
- Ceska Trebova
- Pardubice main station
- Kolin
- Praha-Liben
- Prague main station
This man1 rode all the way to Hranice na Morave. There 3 guys got on and rode to Olomouc main station. In Olomouc girl1 got on, along with one very old grandpa, for whom I had to make room by moving my bag, which from then on sat at my feet. In Zabreh na Morave another girl got on (girl2), who sat down next to girl1, and the grandpa got off, so girl2 took the opportunity and moved to his vacated seat after me. Why, I don’t know, either she didn’t want the sun shining on her or she didn’t want sunamo looking at her O:).
As soon as we left Zabreh na Morave, yet another girl3 walked past about 2 times, because she was looking for a seat for so long that in the end she almost whispered whether the seat vacated by girl2 was free, girl1 said yes, and so we were “complete”. The express stopped at Ceska Trebova, girl1 got off and tried to manage all her luggage (she had 2 big bags and 1 small plastic bag).
She put the plastic bag on the floor, it fell over, so I picked it up for her, she smiled at me and said “thank you, that’s kind of you”, and I, encouraged right away, asked her whether I could help her carry it out. Sadly I said it in such a squeaky voice that I was surprised myself that I was still capable of something like that, I don’t know what I’d compare it to, but it simply sounded awful, I don’t normally talk like that O:).
She smiled even more and said it wasn’t necessary. I was surprised that both girl1 and girl3 were traveling on a student ticket on a public holiday (they also handed the conductor their student discount card), only girl2 had a ticket printed from the CD e-shop, and when she handed it to the conductor, she said something about having to buy an add-on, which I didn’t quite understand, but maybe I just misheard. What else I remember: when girl2 was handing her ticket to the conductor, her phone happened to ring, probably from the railways, and she had to hang up right away, because we were just going through tunnels.
The whole time from when I stopped reading the Bible all the way to Prague I mostly looked out of the window, occasionally replying to Lenicka when she wrote to me. The rest of this route, that is Ceska Trebova – Prague main station, the 3 of us rode alone, nobody else sat down with us, although they could have, there were candidates. Only just before Prague, when everyone thought we would arrive any moment, we stopped in a tunnel for about 15 minutes, while a train passed us going the other way. People joked that we were running ahead of schedule, so we had to stand somewhere in order to arrive according to the timetable.
It’s strange that this was my third trip to Prague and every time the train arrived 15-20 minutes ahead of schedule. Before we even pulled into the platform, I saw from the train that an OBB locomotive, aka RailJet in the Czech Republic, was standing at the platform. That should be enough about the trip to Prague, now on to the part about arriving in Prague and what I did there.
I got off the train, took off my hoodie and put it in my bag. That created a problem for me: where to put all the electronics and my wallet. I needed to stash the Samsung Galaxy S+, which had the GPS navigation, then the Nokia 101, which had the VF SIM and on which Lenicka could call me at any time, then my wallet, and also the chunky outdoor Garmin navigator. My biggest fear was that I would lose the phones, because I would have no way to block the lost SIM card, but fortunately nothing got lost during my whole trip around Prague. Another problem was that the Nokia 101 has no keypad lock, and that morning I had already pointlessly spent 6 minutes on a call to the PPL Ostrava depot, because it dialed by itself and the people on the other end couldn’t figure it out.
I could have put it in my little backpack, but then Lenicka might have to wait until I got the phone out, and that wouldn’t be good. The second option was to just put the phone in the plastic bag in which I had the gifts for Lenicka. Once again my poor memory kicked in, because I put the Nokia 101 in the backpack but thought I had put it in the bag. So when I got to the other side of the platform, I started freaking out that I had left my phone there and went back.
On a bench I pulled everything out and found out the truth. Fine, so I went to the other side of the platform again, took a few photos with my phone and camera, and the ones I took with my phone I posted on FB, including my location. For example, I took a photo of that RailJet locomotive. I’m still amazed that in Prague those old orange carts still drive along the platform, which I haven’t seen in Tesin for several years. I almost collided with one of them, because it was driving like crazy. O:) I finally left the platform and walked through the station hall. I found myself in a sort of little park, where lots of people were sitting on benches, some were even having a picnic. I went right and turned on the Garmin, but somehow it couldn’t get a GPS fix, it had only 1 bar out of 5. So I turned it off and on again, but the same thing.
I even tried taking out and swapping the batteries, but sadly the same thing. In that spot it simply wouldn’t lock on, which was probably the first time that had happened to me. I wondered what could have caused it, sure, across the street from me there was a roughly 4-story building, but next to me was that little park, and I had already been in situations where I was in a narrow alley between much taller buildings and the signal held up just fine. So I continued using the GPS on my phone, but eventually the navigation beeped, which meant something had happened. And what happened was that it finally locked on. So I put the phone away again, took out the Garmin, and went to my first geocache Jan Rohac z Dube https://www.geocaching.com/geocache/GCRH4J_jan-rohac-z-dube . Sadly I didn’t find it, the coordinates pointed me to a tree by the path, but the hint for it read:
It’ll be a tough nut
on the Yew a hook
not into the mess
it’s by the path
squirrels guard it
they’ll let you take photos
share the photo
and give it to me in the log:)
, which sadly I didn’t decipher (only now did it dawn on me that I should have plucked up the courage and gone into that greenery, regardless of what anyone else might think. See “It’ll be a tough nut, on the Yew a hook”) and after 5 minutes and a quick search of the area I gave up.
Now I’m looking at this picture..
..,which would have guided me a bit better away from the path toward the houses, their greenery and the mini park, but it doesn’t matter now anyway. I refuse to hunt caches that don’t have a clear and unambiguous hint anyway. Then I went to my next cache, the nearby Praha – Hlavni nadrazi / Prague – The Main Station https://www.geocaching.com/geocache/GCP7YK_praha-hlavni-nadrazi-prague-the-main-station . That one gave me a bit of trouble, at first I went down the path, but when I reached a spot where it started to look suspicious, I went back up and thanks to the navigation I found it quickly. The problem was getting this cache out! At first I had the feeling that it opened somehow, but then I realized that was nonsense and that I didn’t have to be afraid to take it off, that it was all one piece.
I was also afraid that with my catastrophically shaky hands the cache would slip out and fall down, because it was stuck as if welded on. In the end, when all the people had left, I carefully “broke off” the right part first, the left one was then a piece of cake. My reward was my first cache found in Prague, and a great logbook too. Next up was the cache Kostel sv. Apolinare https://www.geocaching.com/geocache/GC3V24Z_kostel-sv-apolinare . This cache was very easy, my biggest enemy here were the beetles – I had never seen so many of them anywhere. I disguised it nicely after myself and moved on. My next stop was the cache Nuselske schody https://www.geocaching.com/geocache/GCYWHM_nuselske-schody .
I bagged this one instantly too, the hardest part was scrambling up those stairs with the carriage-load of stuff I was hauling, and in that heat too O:). With this cache we are past half of the caches I visited, and now only 3 remain. By now I had used up practically all the traditional caches I had saved in the Garmin, so I switched back to my phone. It found that the nearest cache was Vinohradska synagoga https://www.geocaching.com/geocache/GC1GBR1_vinohradska-synagoga . The GPS accuracy was really bad, but the hint was great, so I found the cache in a short while, because there was no other object of this kind around.
At the end I found one more cache and didn’t find the last one of the day. The one I found was the cache Apolinar: https://www.geocaching.com/geocache/GC1Y69X_apolinar . Even though at first I didn’t notice the coconut on the tree, because it wasn’t at eye level, it didn’t take long before it clicked.
I signed the log, I had to use my own pencil, because there was an IKEA pencil in the cache, but it was worn down to the core. If I’d had a sharpener, I would have sharpened it there. The second cache, which I didn’t find, was Muzeum Policie CR https://www.geocaching.com/geocache/GC1K3NZ_muzeum-policie-cr-czech-police-museum . When I was at it, Lenicka called me, because at the previous cache I had asked her to call me, saying I needed to talk to her. So I told her that in 21 minutes I should be at the main station on foot, that this is what Google Navigation had calculated for me, and also that I had bought her half a kilo of strawberries to go with the little gifts I already had for her.
Lenicka started laughing that I was a terrible little nutcase and that she didn’t want anything. Then as I walked to the main station, Lenicka just exchanged a few texts with me, in which she told me she had no way of getting to the main station, so I had to lug all of it back home. There was much more to it, but describing everything down to the last detail would take me about 2 more days to write, so just a short note about each cache. I was at the main station at 4:15 p.m. and then I just waited. At 5:19 p.m. the Pendolino arrived, and when I saw it was going to Bohumin, I told myself I would take it.
But I had to buy a seat reservation, so I ran into the hall and looked for a CD kiosk. In the end I found one, asked for a reservation and ran back. Of course I was seated in carriage 6, the 2nd from the end, so I ran to the end of the train and got on. There, since I hadn’t read the whole reservation but only its top line, which said “car 6“, “middle row” and other information, but not which seat. When the conductor came, I showed her my ticket and reservation and she told me I had seat 81. After that it was no problem to find it.
The trip back wasn’t pleasant, because of screaming kids and their mother – I’d rather not say which minority they were from, so I don’t get accused of something in this rotten banana republic. I have never had a worse train ride in my life and I hope I never will. Unbearable! Too bad they rode all the way to Ostrava-Svinov like me – I was glad to get off the Pendolino here and board a regular local train. The Pendolino was terminating in Bohumin, and from there my train would only have left an hour later and I would have arrived in Tesin 11 minutes later.
Anyway, I barely made the connection in Svinov, and maybe I wouldn’t have made it if it hadn’t had a 6-minute delay. The Pendolino itself had a delay of more than 45 minutes. I arrived in Tesin 6 minutes late (so the train didn’t lose another minute), where my brother was already waiting for me and drove me home.
Some photos from the trip are here, there are no photos related to the caches, so you’ll mostly find only photos of the train there: Train photos on SkyDrive – the link is deader than Flash Player.