The Church of Bones

Another 1959 Butlins look-alike

As I forecast, it was a little on the noisy side last night! Even with my earplugs stuffed in as hard as they would go, the rumbling of the trains was, to say the least, very audible. However, before I went to bed I had a near disaster with my little Primus petrol stove when the fuel bottle suffered a catastrophic failure of the threaded top. Thank God the stove wasn’t actually alight at the time as I dread to think what the consequences might have been with a litre of petrol under pressure spraying from the top of the bottle!. I’ve never heard of such a failure before, in that the entire threaded section just popped of the top of the bottle. I had never realised that they were two separate pieces… I think I’ll go back to an MSR bottle when I get home! Fortunately I use a similar bottle for engine oil so I’ve now swapped then over so I can still brew a cup of tea, but I think I’ll try to source a gas canister for my other little stove rather than risk the oil bottle too much.

The Church of Bones

Anyway, the noisy night meant I was up and showered by about 6.30am, although I couldn’t go anywhere as the main gate was locked until 8. So a leisurely breakfast of sultana pancakes and a couple of cups of tea passed the time until I saw the gate open. Unusually for me I just set the GPS to shortest distance for Kunta Hora and let it go! First though it was a quick trip to the supermarket for some lunch bits and then just follow the GPS, easy peasy. Initially the road was fairly straight and far to “main” for my liking but then the fun started. When you set shortest distance, that’s exactly what you get; back road, housing estates, tiny little lanes, the lot! Things soon settled down a bit and I found myself on some really nice roads, over the hills and through lots of forests, just my sort of journey. From Hraniche it routed me to Olomouc then dropped a little south through  Konice and Jevicko, a small town with a rather beautiful town square as many Czech towns seem to have. Then it seems to miss most of the town until I got to Hlinsko, then once again though the back doubles all the way to Kutna Hora. Altogether one of the best autorouted GPS rides I think I’ve ever had.

Even without the Church of Bones, Kutna Hora is a really nice place to be, in fact as is so often the case the reality doesn’t quite live up to hype. Yes, it is very different to anything you’ll generally find in a church (or anywhere else for that matter) but whether it’s down to the hoards of tourists or something else I simple don’t know , but I didn’t find it to be quite as jaw-dropping a sight as I expected it to be. Macabre? certainly; spooky? Hardly with a couple of hundred tourists popping camera flashes every second or so. Stick me in there alone at night with just a candle or two for illumination and I guess the old imagination might run amok. Anyway it’s another box ticked on that great long list of things to do before I die!

And so to sleep, perchance to dream… well hopefully not of the church of bones… Yes, once again I’m in a cabin, but this one is far more modern and fresh looking! And yet again I have six beds to choose from, but with a bit more room to walk between then and even a kettle for my morning tea… Sheer luxury and all for £8 just £2 more than putting up the tent; no contest really. Not with the sky clouding over and starting to look a little ominous anyway! Gone soft? Me? Ok, perhaps just a little, although I must confess I do miss the wild camping and the freedom and peace it gives. Tomorrow Prague, so I guess it may be another camp site, cabin or even dare I say, hotel! Then it will be back to basics as I head off to Germany to stay a night or so with Hanno that I met in Greece at the Horizons meeting.