September 20, 2019: Znojmo to Hrabětice - Praha to Wien Greenway Tour (Tour 19) - 2019 🇨🇿 🇦🇹 - CycleBlaze

September 20, 2019

September 20, 2019: Znojmo to Hrabětice

Cruising on flat ground

Hotel: Penzion Haklův Mlýn, € 46

GOOD breakfasts are great on a bike tour and today was pretty good. Plentiful. Varied. Tasty. I had initially thought nobody was in the hotel but the breakfast room was pretty busy this morning. This hotel is a lot bigger than I had thought.

Yesterday I carried my bike upstairs lock, stock and barrel. With the bags still on, I carried it back down this morning with everything still on so I did not have to struggle with hooking everything back together. This was another good thing. In the meantime, I had carried the other bike down, leaned it against a wall, and while I got mine, down came bike number one onto its mirror. Seven bad years coming, I suppose!

It took a moment to figure out the gps track since we had to get to the routing on the device before I could follow along. Then it was a long roll down and then a slight incline and we were out of the city. I could see the rolling hills around Znojmo and the city receding as we climbed. The route jogged around quite a bit and I could see we did not take the most direct route out, but the roads were quiet compared to the faster highway I could see in the distance at times. We were back onto the PVGW route and were starting to see changes in the terrain and the crops. While even yesterday we were in lots of steep hilly areas, now the terrain was still hilly but not as steep. Now there were more and more vineyards of both blue and green grapes, many chestnut trees just groaning with the spikey little nuts - I have been keeping my fingers crossed that we will come upon vendors with roasted chestnuts (we never found them for sale).

We came upon towns with glorious old buildings, castles on hilltops and rivers flowing through. One old building must have been an old mill building but now was abandoned. There also seemed to be numerous Soviet-era buildings in what looked like abandoned compounds. Bunker-looking places that are all walled in, with guard buildings at the gates. Interesting.

Today's riding was again helped by a decent tailwind though nothing like previous. Before we knew it, we were turning away from the Greenway. When I was researching the route some months ago when I was back home, I tried to find accommodations right on the route but it was not always possible. Today was one of the more extreme examples. We had to turn and ride about five kilometres straight north of the Greenway, then another seven kilometres straight east until we got to Hrabĕtice. Most of this was on relatively flat ground so we zipped along around 21 km/h.

Discussion about the level-ground cycling. The mountains and hills make for difficult and slow cycling but are spectacular; flat ground make for very easy and fast cycling but it can be monotonous at times. Today there were periods of some monotony whereas the past week has been awesome. I prefer to cycle tour where there are hills and/or mountains.

Because of the short distance, the early departure, the level ground, the tailwaind and our conditioning after cycling all of this time, we got to the penzion at around 11:30 am. Too early. That being said, the workers scurried around and the room was ready within an hour. They ushered us through the restaurant area to the back of the room where they allowed us to put our bikes for the night and we dropped our bags in the room.

This being a tiny village, there were no restaurants open for lunch. Rather, we went to the nearby Coop market, which was tiny, by the way, before it closed at 4 pm and picked up a few things for a snacky lunch and for breakfast in the morning. We don't need much, but got yogourt to go with our granola and oranges and some type of pastry. Enough to get us rolling on what should be another fairly easy day.

We took a little walk around the block to where we had seen a sign where some one was selling something called 'burčák'. Not at all like what some places call 'new wine' this is almost like wine-in-the-making. It is the must, or juice with the yeast fermenting it, but not yet complete. It is somewhere between four and eleven percent alcohol, but undetermined since it is ongoing. We shared one glass of red  and one glass of white. It was an interesting taste, kind of like a slightly fizzy grape juice. It was actually pretty good.

After the drink sample we wandered up and around the old church in the centre of the village before returning to the room to relax before dinner. As well, I tried to get in touch with the bike shop in Vienna to confirm our arrival time in order to collect bike boxes for our return flight.

The restaurant here in our penzion was to be open from 6-9 pm so we translated a menu then went down for an amazing salmon and arugula salad. It is in the top three meals of this trip so far. The slab of salmon was to-die-for tasty and flaky and went well with the greens and cherry tomatoes. The meal was a nice change from the gravies and dumplings of the last few days, though I do like them, too. Though now this place is quite nice, I think it is an old building that has been updated and is really quite nice, and the restaurant was attractive as well.

It was in the later part of this day that I came to a few realizations. One was related to this trip - the sun is starting to set on this trip, and in less than a week it will be all over. Trip 19 will be done. The other realization is more philosophical about life in general. Sometimes things feel like forever. Like those we know and those in our family will be around and with us forever. But that is not the case. It is more like they are on a loan to us, and the time we have is very limited. Our kidlets are there from birth and day-by-day they grow up in front of us until one day, they move on to their own lives. That scares me. Enjoy those moments, cherish those moments. Work together on the aerogarden. Plan that bike trip to France and do it. Alex, we are going on that bike trip I have promised you since the day you came home after you were born. We are going, my lad.

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Some baaaaaad haircuts along the PVGW today. -- near Hrabětice, Czechia.
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Hrad Jaroslavice. -- Jaroslavice, Czechia
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-- Hrabětice, Czechia
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-- Hrabětice, Czechia
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Today's ride: 38 km (24 miles)
Total: 374 km (232 miles)

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