Jemnice – a small town in the Czech Republic

I had a mission of my own on this trip and that was to visit my “American familys” ancestors birth places and see what they looked like. Unfortunately I could only find out about one of them but luckily it was pretty much on our way to Kutna Hora and the Bone Church on our way up north. It did turn out to be a pretty time consuming detour though – possibly the GPS lead us on to the small and winding roads a little too early so it took a lot more than the extra 1 hour we were told by the stupid little navigator. But looking on the map it pretty much looked like a shortcut! Oh well, luckily the roads were really nice and fun to ride and the landscape was very nice. And the sun was of course shining!.
Below are a bunch of pictures of the surroundings of Jemnice – as the little town is called – and of course of the square in the middle of the place which naturally is all built up around a neat little church. Very nice looking and tidy place but the first glance of the place when entering Jemnice I got a little puzzled of what I saw – a junk yard!

Pretty flat landscape in the whole area

First time we saw a cross like this by the road

Welcome to Jemnice huh!? Hmmm

Approaching the town center.

Are there no people living here?

Nice and tidy though.

It was sunday just after lunch so I guess that’s why the shops were closed but there were no people in the church either.

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It didn’t take long to finish the Jemnice square tour so we went for some lunch instead! Jan seemed to have ordered potato croquettes but it did say pineapple and chicken on the menu too. We think. The lady in the restaurant barely spoke any english at all and the menu was hard to understand.

And I got a healthy fish and no potatoes 🙂 Cant believe how cheap the food was here. Both our courses with drinks did cost about the same as one big beer at a fancy restaurant in Stockholm! And it was delicious too!

The church on top of the hill.

Jemnice outskirts

Time to continue the trip.

A neighboring village on our way towards Kutna Hora.

So my curiosity got satisfied! I’m glad we made this detour even though Jan didn’t seem too excited at first which is understandable since he didn’t have any connection to the place at all. Anyway, I hope my friends “over there” will find it nice to see what the place looks like.

Photo by Svetislav Todorovic

We got some photos sent to us from Svetislav or “Steve” whom we met in Lepenac in Serbia. I really love the hay stack image and asked him if I could share his pictures on this blog. So we could.

Below are some of his pictures from this beautiful country different times of the day and from different parts of the year. Enjoy.

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Polferries from Gdansk to Sweden

Back home after 19 totally fantastic days on the road. Not a single drop of rain, nice and sunny weather every day after our visit to Auschwitz which I think had the best possible weather to get the right feeling of the horrible place (grey and misty). Even when we got home to Sweden today the sun was shining. Again! We’ve had so much fun and have met so many nice and friendly people and I’m just totally happy! Now back to work and start planning for the next journey somewhere sometime…

I will post some more pictures here the following days to catch up with the past days of traveling and maybe some more. There has been long days on the bikes the last days and not too much spare time to sit by the computer. Especially not on the ferry last night because the sea was very rough and I actually started to feel a little sick, but after a sea-sick pill and a glass of wine I was back in business :). Dead tired though so the last night was not much of a party.

Jan wrote something about the horrible food on the ferry we had for dinner last night… well take a look at what they served for breakfast!! Yikes.

Well this is only decoration in the diner, thank god…

Approaching Nynäshamn – the Polferrys destination is 50-60 km south of Stockholm City. Nice weather and sunny even in Sweden! 🙂 A little colder though but not bad, about 16 degrees celsius today.

First stop in Sweden was my house, Jan has another 10 km home so this is where we said bye bye. When we left that friday almost 3 weeks ago I forgot to set my trip meter at home but I remembered it halfway to the ferry in Nynäshamn so I zero’ed it on the road. The strange co-incidence is that when we passed the exact same spot today my meter turned to 5000 km sharp! My total milage on this trip ended up at 5030 kilometers. Pretty good I must say and I’m so happy my bike was cooperative with me all the time – I mean, it IS a Harley after all… 😉

…more later
//Tina

The bone church, Tjeck republic and home……

We´re on the ferry back home now.

We left Croatia and has done a fair amount of bike riding each day. Arrived to Kutna Hora east of Prague on sunday afternoon/early evening and the reason for us being in Kutna Hora, the bone church, had just closed for the day. So we found a hotel, had dinner and looked at the city before hitting the sack.

Visited the bone church rather early monday morning and we got in just before a buss load of chineese tourists arrived. Interesting place. Don´t remember the story completely but someone took sacred soil from Palestine to the church many hundred of years ago and lots of people wanted to get buried there because of this. And when the grave yard could´t fit more graves people started to stack up bones from dead people inside the church instead. And later these bones where organized by people working at the church and now it pretty much look like they´ve created christmas decorations from human bones and skulls. Odd but interesting place. I´ll post a link to the church later so you can read the history yourselfs. I don´t remember exactly…… Some pics……:

Ok. There is a web link on this sign. www.kostnice.cz

A pic from the grave yard.

The first thing you see when entering the church.

And to the right…..

I don´t know how many people there is in this pic but it must be quite a few.

Howdy.

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I call him “George”.

Tina stayed in the church and took some more pics while I walked out to our bikes. 60 over excited chineese tourists arrived within minutes later after they´ve visited the church and they started to take pictures of themselves next to the bikes and quite many also tried to sit on Tinas bike so that their fellows could take pictures of them on the bike. I got scared that they might tip the bike over so I had to tell quite many of them to please leave the bikes alone but that didn´t do much good since not many of them understood any english. They instead surrounded me and took their pictures with me in it… Total chaos. And all of a sudden their tour leader blew in a whistle and they all got on their bus and left within seconds later. And there I stood puzzled and confused…..

Tina arrived and we soon left to head north into Poland. Tina forgot to take off the disk lock from her rear wheel before starting her engine. I saw what was about to happened just when she was about to drive off so I yelled at her and she turned the engine off and unlocked the disk lock. Really easy to forget a thing like this but the result from a mistake like this can be anything from hurtful to expensive. I hardly ever lock my bike when going into museums or restaurants. I tend to leave my bike jacket, helmet and everything else on the bike and I often even forget to take the ignition key from the bike too so my bike is really easy to steal. I´m such a “knickedick”…… 😉

Tina communicating with bulls……

Tina taking a nap at the ferry port in Gdansk.

The food on the ferry was indeed horrible. This is not really a passenger ship but more like a cargo ship that also takes a limited number of passengers. I guess they are only used to feeding polish truck drivers and they seem more interested in beer than in food. There is a regular passenger/car ship too that goes between Nynäshamn south of Stockholm to Gdansk but it didn´t fit our schedule. So we opted for drunk truck drivers as travel companions and really horrible food instead of traveling some more days. We were on the cargo ship on our way to Poland when we started our trip too so we knew that the food was no good. “No good” is a understatement. The food was horrible.

Will most likely sum the whole trip in one last post in a couple of days. Lots of work and other things ahead. Hectic fall and winter. More within a couple of days. Thanks for reading.

//Jan

Last breakfast in Poland

Had a long day on our bikes yesterday, traffic in this country sucks. Today we have 250 km left to travel but we better calculate that it’ll take all day… Yesterday we passed a tragic accident on the road and the traffic stood probably still the whole afternoon. We passed it smoothly with our bikes though. We had some grey skies too yesterday (late afternoon only) and for the first time we had trouble finding a hotell that was not full! We ended up in Gniezno finally finding a nice place so yesterday did turn out great after all. Total milage yesterday: 480 km.

And today the sun is shining. Again 🙂

This pic is taken at a very nice sunset in the mountains of Serbia, actually the very same day my regular camera ran out of batteries that Jan kindly wrote about earlier. Surprisingly nice shot for being taken with a phone camera I think…