Saturday, June 29th, 2024

Distance ridden 376 kilometres

We needed to make an early start. Some friends from New York City, that we had not seen for over fifteen years, were flying into Prague (where one of them once lived for a time) before leaving again, almost immediately, to tour elsewhere in Europe by car.

They were, quite literally, going to make a “cameo” appearance and were bringing their daughter (who was a bump in her mother’s belly the last time I “saw” her), to Prague in order to present her to the throng of people that they know there. We re-planned, which cut a couple of days off of our trip and geared up to head back south.

We ate our breakfast, packed up the Softail and I drove it past the scary plastic wild pigs and down the gravelly slope.

For safety’s sake, Lucie walked down the hill and climbed on board once I had reached the slightly less gravelly road at the bottom.

We started off going back the way we had come, there was not much choice. However, with time being very much of the proverbial “essence”, we decided to find and stick to the bigger roads, as far as was possible, in order to save time.

For this reason, instead of heading towards the scary town of Šumperk, we set our course towards Uničov. This led through some delightful, sun drenched countryside where the harvest was already in progress – and the occasional sleepy village.

In Uničov, we filled the tank and then drove through more lovely countryside where, in addition to the inevitable barley, both apples and poppies were being cultivated.

We found the D35 (E442) at Mohelnice. The better road helped our rate of progress, but it was the first morning of the school holidays and the level of traffic was a bit scary. It was mainly heading out of Prague and, hence, coming towards us, but there was also a lot of traffic leaving Moravia via the northern route and heading west. As I remarked in our account of leaving Prague ourselves, work is underway to make the whole of Road 35 into a motorway, but that work still has a long way to go. This meant that after leaving Mohelnice, we were on a good, but very crowded road almost all the way back to Pardubice.

In turn that meant queues at every roundabout and through the towns along the way, not to mention the almost suicidal actions of some drivers frantically trying to get out of side roads. The fact we were on a big motorcycle, with a bright headlight, did not seem to make us visible at all. I had to do a lot of breaking and one or two sharp, evasive, maneuvers. It would have been a bit wearing in normal weather, but it had also become stiflingly hot. I was again riding in just my HOG vest and shirtsleeves, but I was still sweating, even at speed.

After what seemed an eternity, we came to the completed stretch of motorway and the volume of traffic thinned, as if by magic. It was not long before the castle, perched on the Kunětice mountain appeared again, but this time to our left, which signalled that we were nearing the junction with the D11 motorway that would take us all the way home.

We stopped for a drink at the same service area, but on the other side, as we had on the outward journey. Off of the bike and out of what little breeze there was, it was even hotter, so we did not dawdle. A quick iced-coffee for me, an espresso and a cigarette for Lucie and we were off on the final haul.

At our moderate speeds it took just over an hour to gobble up the D11, the Prague ring-road and pull gratefully up outside of our house. We were so exhausted, we almost felt as if we had not been away at all !

Then it was a quick unpack, a cooling shower and we were off to meet our friends. We went on the tram – it had air conditioning !