Sorry if I’ve managed to totally bore you all to death with all of the pictures of buildings… but there are more church pictures in this post. Only a couple, though. Promise. :-)
On Friday (Day 42) we left Prague and headed to Neusorg, Germany. I had no idea where this was when I booked a place to stay — all I knew was that it was in the mountains and therefore cooler than the miserable, humid heat wave that had enveloped most of the continent. And it was, thankfully! In fact, we got a fair amount of rain, meaning we didn’t even do some of the hiking we’d planned to do. Neither of us were complaining though — it’s been a lovely chance to have some downtime and do a lot of reading and napping.
Anyway, before we left Prague, I got up at dawn and headed over to Prague Castle at 6 to make the 7AM service at St. Vitus Cathedral. Back in Ireland, I decided I was going to try to go to church in every country we went to, and so far, the only one I’ve missed was Bosnia.
I love being out at sunrise. I love being up when so few people are, and the only people who are out are out for a purpose, so they’re going somewhere quickly and generally not paying too much attention. I don’t know how someone could not pay attention to that sunrise, though — it was absolutely amazing. At the service, there were a total of eight people, including two nuns. The priest was old and wore Ecco sandals under his robe. I’m not sure why I found that amusing, but I did.
Yes, it is good to be alive.
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East end of St. Vitus, facing the morning sun.
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Facing east and the altar, with the morning sun coming through the front windows.
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After church, I wandered around town for a bit longer, enjoying the early morning peace, and then I headed back to rouse John so we could pack and catch our first of three trains of the day.
This is the last of our three trains, in Marktredwitz, Germany. They had to plug it in and charge it before we could leave. I for some reason found that amusing.
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We got to Neusorg, Germany around 6:30 PM. We checked into our hotel and went wandering around the very very small town for a bit before dinner. I found some wild raspberries -- this made me very happy. Well, that, and the 25-degrees-cooler weather.
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Our first night in Germany, we were woken up at 4AM by an INCREDIBLE electrical storm. I tried to get pictures with my big camera, as well as video with my cell phone, but for some reason neither one came out. Bummer. So you’ll just have to imagine a huge, booming storm. It was fantastic. :-)
You can't tell from this picture from our room window, but it's POURING outside. It poured most of Saturday, off and on. So I took three naps and read in between naps. It was heavenly.
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Today it threatened rain off and on, but eventually cleared up. I was going to go to church in the morning, but I found out that the local church only has services once a month (the pastor rotates through several villages in the area) so there was no church in town this morning. Oh well. So we had breakfast and took a short hike into the forest, then came back and read for a while and took a nap, then headed out for a walk to find a lake I'd seen on Google Earth, only we couldn't find it, so we headed back and parked it under a tree in the backyard to read. I can't complain. :-)
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Where we are now:
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