Day 17 - High and Windy

Peaceful sleep on the mountainside, minimal breakfast but generous coffee. (We don't carry a stove or start a fire, so Deb has a custom instant cappuccino blend and shakes vigorously.)

Popping back onto the trail, our day's hike starts down to through grumpy town of Kateřina and back up from the neighboring friendly town of Jeřetin.

Overlooking Jeřetin is something that looks like it might be ski apparatus but it's actually an impressive set of Stations of the Cross, culminating in a small chapel.

(During a period of forced conversion to Catholicism, seven brothers from this area chose to remain Protestant and flee the country, giving up their land. Then all seven had a dream where Jesus suggested that the youngest, sickly brother return, become Catholic, and retain the family's holdings. The newly-Catholic brother prayed on this hill and was cured of his ailments, so he built the chapel here in appreciation. The trail goes right up past the chapel.)

We're really in the mountains now, which feels wonderful. No offense, Brandenburg, but nothing beats being up high!

Soon we pass one of the major crossroads of European long-distance hiking, the intersection of the E10 (our trail) and the E3 (more of an east-west trail.)

Here we learn that the southbound E10 does not, in fact, terminate in the Italian Alps as we'd earlier read, but in fact continues on to Gibraltar. At least in theory; sometimes these trail plans are on the aspirational side.

(This trail maker also shows our elevation at 625 meters, the highest we've been this whole trip... and we're not even at the top of anything in particular; we're just high. And happy.)

It would actually be great to head east on the E3, hugging the mountain borderlands back into Poland and then south into the High Tatras of Slovakia. We don't have time for that trip, so instead we'll be slowly descending to Prague, which has its own allure for sure.

For now, we're high and the views are great:

Deb is still studying her Czech...

We take a lunch break at a fresh mountain spring, complete with a cute wooden spring-house, right in the trail. What a joy to have naturally potable water again! Maybe it will save us from having to buy water.

Just in case, though, Deb is still learning Czech...

Eventually the trail winds down to the small city of Nový Bor, a center of Czech glass art. This glass man guards the town:

Even though we love our time in the mountains, we don't mind when fate occasionally dictates that we spend an evening in civilization. And Deb finished learning Czech just in time, so we're able to check into the fancy hotel downtown and get a very fine meal of local specialties at the nearby restaurant Culinaria, accompanied by our new favorite Czech wine, Tramín.

Dinner is made even more dramatic by an apocalyptic wind storm that blows open the shutters and menaces some of the glass art. Fighting back to the hotel through the gale, we're dodging trash cans, sculptures, and upper-floor flower pots. The hotel windows are sturdy (though not quite as sturdy as German windows, just sayin') so we and our room's art glass decor are out of danger for the night. Probably a good thing we didn't end up camping.