Day 7 - Prague to Wroclaw

 No POIs today, just riding. Yet another beautiful day, 25 degrees when we finally left, having had to extricate the bikes from their parking spot, after some clown in a van had almost blocked them in.

As Ginny burst into life, I noticed her mileage showed bang on 30,000. The observant among you, will know that means, I had travelled exactly 1,000 miles from Eurotunnel to Prague.

Should be 33, by time I'm home

Within minutes of leaving, we had our first separation, when Grizzly got caught by traffic lights, and then his Garmin took him a different route than Tomtom. Our first stop, for fuel, was only 6 miles away, so we were soon re-united. This was our one and only fuel stop in Czechia.

Despite masses of effort in the route planning/creation, to ensure Tomtom and Garmin follow the same route, there are still differences. Feck alone knows why. One thing they do agree on though, is that at one point today, there is no road coming from the left. Both wrong. We sped through a give way junction, before we realised!!! Luckily it was a quiet road and there was no traffic coming from the left, otherwise things could have got interesting.

As we are now getting used to these, we arrived at what appeared to be a road closure. Here we go again, I thought. Grizzly's Garmin though, indicated there was a route through the roadworks. As Tomtom doesn't give me that information, I suggested Grizzly lead the way. We only had about 6km to go to our first coffee stop.

Now, this is where Grizzly becomes a totally different animal, Jeykell and Hyde, one might say. When following, he drops back from me, is slow through corners and seems unable to accelerate out of a roundabout faster than a tortoise. Soon as he leads though, he guns it away from lights/roundabouts, steams into bends and it is then me who ends up dropping back. He laughs when I mention it but it's fact. Go figure.

We stopped at Lidl and sat at a nearby picnic bench, whilst Grizzly topped up his carbs. The going was good, sunny, reasonably warm, as we climbed into the hills/mountains and on to our next stop. Another coffee stop, more food for Grizzly (where does he put it all?) but in the most wonderful setting, surrounded by pine trees and alongside a river. 

A lovely setting for a coffee stop

Continuing, we only went a few kilometres more before we crossed the border back into Poland, at which there seemed to be a large thriving holiday resort. They may even ski there in winter, I expect.

AS we neared Wroclaw we hit some serious traffic and some equally serious temperatures. As I said before, we have been blessed to have had all dry riding time but the temperatures are just a tad too high for riding in comfort. It was 32 degrees as we pulled into the hotel car park!

The hotel, The Europeum, is easily the best we have stayed in this week. Very posh, clean, large room and beautiful bathroom. There's just one thing that has let it down, the lift is broken, and we are on the 2nd floor. Oxygen please! Grizzly got his bag carried up by some strapping young man but still we have to mark it down.

Wroclaw, city of dwarfs is perfect for Grizzly. Dwarf, leprechaun, what's the difference? It is called that, because, sited all around the city, are over 1000 little brass dwarves or gnomes. I have an app on the phone which shows you the location of each on and lets you tick them off when you have visited them. We managed to chalk off 34 on our excursion to the main square, for dinner. We even found one on a bike, which does look remarkably like Grizzly! 😂

Tell me it doesn't look like Grizzly

Wroclaw isn;t all about dwarves though, the main square has some very nice architecture.

Miejskie Centrum Zarzadzania Kryzysowego

We tried some proper Polish grub tonight and as the other night, 2 courses, because it's so cheap to eat out in Poland.

Starter

Main

We are in Poland for the next 3 nights. Tomorrow, we travel to Oswiecim. The weather has broken this evening, so tomorrow could be our first riding day in waterproofs. Fingers crossed it's not though.