After four days in Zlin, it is time to make our way west. It's basically an uneventful drive, except at the very end when we try to buy groceries. Since we are staying at a vacation house, we decide it would make the most sense to buy enough food for the week ahead. We buy a week's worth of groceries for five people (think: a lot of food), and, since we don't have shopping bags with us, pack the food into boxes. We've loaded the van and are ready to depart when the cashier and security guard come running out, explaining that the credit card transaction had failed (now they tell us!). To make a long story short, we spent the next half hour waiting for them to reconcile the till, bringing the groceries back in, unloading them, and rescanning them all ... Finally we paid cash ... who knows where that credit card transaction went ...

But, ultimately, we got our food and proceeded to our rental house in the small town of Klenovice. We turned off the highway onto a dirt road, woods and cornfields all around.

Back to Bohemia

From the front, the house looked quite modest, and we wondered if it would be big enough ...

Yup, it's big enough!

Bright and early the next morning, we drive to the old town of Cesky Krumlov. It's as picturesque as they come.

Our first stop in the town is the home of Yanna, Honsa's mother, where she senses how close to starvation we are, and immediately feeds us.

View from Yanna's kitchen

We walk from Yanna's house to the castle. Yanna was a tour guide at the castle for many years, and she shares all sorts of fascinating history of the castle and the area.

Honza and Ned in the castle courtyard .....

It begins to rain ... We take shelter and wait.

The rain stops ... the sun comes out ... We explore the castle's beautiful old arboretum and formal gardens.

We start seeing mushrooms!

Mushroom picking seems to be the Czech national pasttime, enjoyed by young and old alike.

Apparently no place, even the castle gardens, are off-limits!

They were delicious!

Back to Yanna's for a picnic lunch in her garden, and then home for an early night ... Tomorrow morning, we are going to the country house to do more mushroom hunting with Yanna, son Standa, and his wife Merka

Syl and Ed head out to find mushrooms ....

There are lots of blueberries!

We start off slow ...

But in two hours, we've picked several basketfulls of many varieties of mushroom, under the watchful eyes of Yanna, Standa, and Merka.


Yanna is pleased.

So are we!

These look like whale baleen, but they are actually mushrooms

Merka prepares them with salt, flour, and paprika

That night, we use the same technique to cook up the mushrooms as part of a dinner to celebrate Ed and Gloria's 35th anniversary. Congrats!

We start the day at the country house, a half hour from Krumlov.

The next day, we visit Christina in Velesin. Here are her son's beehives in the orchard, which is full of apple trees.

Christina served us a delicious lunch. We spent some time talking and looking at old photos. Here, Christina shows a picture of the old family pharmacy.

Another wonderful family visit! But our time in the Czech Republic was drawing to a close. We had a flight out of Munich the next day.

On our way out of the Czech Republic, we stopped at the (original) Budweiser factory for a surprisingly entertaining tour.

The drive through the Czech and then German countryside was beautiful, but also bittersweet -- leaving behind two weeks of wonderful visits with family, but bringing with us many good memories.