Distance traveled: 35.7 km
Cumulative distance: 35.7
Temperature range: 16-17
No other road data as we are not traveling with our GPS, which tracks the fun stuff, like maximum speed.
We were up at a civil hour this morning as I tried to sort out my Uber app to go to the motorcycle store to pick up our ride. Nan's first order of business was to take the laundry over to a nearby laundry place, not to be confused with a laundromat, so that we could have some fresh clothes for the latter half of the trip. The laundry is a drop off service and the price is based on weight with a minimum charge of 800 Czech Crowns. Most stuff here is relatively inexpensive; laundry service is not. The CDN equivalent is $49 for what wasn't more than one load but it was folded. Not ironed, though I had only one shirt that would have warranted ironing. But we have fresh laundry for the next two weeks or until it runs out, whichever happens first.
I failed in my attempt to get my Uber app working. This is because I have a different roaming number here in Europe than my regular phone number so I was unable to get the texts to verify my identity. No big deal; the hotel called a cab for me.
It was about a 20 minute drive out the rental place, which was at the north end of Prague. About half the drive was along the river so I actually had seen a little of it when we rode the bikes up to Dresden - not that anything looked familiar but as we made our way, I was thinking if I can't arrange a good setup with my phone maps I'll never navigate my way back to the hotel and Nan will be finishing the trip on her own.
Signing the paperwork was relatively painless, though I was a little surprised to have them ask me for cash for the rental. I hadn't prepared for that and I ended up paying a 3% premium for using a credit card. That is actually fairly standard practice here in Europe; many retailers do not like credit cards and in fact, many retailers do not even accept cards. The only real disconcerting thing was that one of the young guys helping me had clearing been in a very bad mishap as he some very nasty stitches on both sides of both forearms and some considerable bruising. His arms did not have bandages though the stitches looked reasonably fresh - I would say about two weeks old. "Motorcycle crash" he told me.
The explanation on the bike was in Czech, which was a little unfortunate as I couldn't ask any but the most basic motorcycle questions. The person with whom I had been emailing to make the arrangements is the owner's daughter and she had gone to Dubrovnik today to pick up a motorcycle. She had clearly had a much better command of English than her dad or brother. Nonetheless, they ran through the basics like traction control, heated grips and that I needed a USB cable, which I had neglected to bring, to have the display on my phone appear on the motorcycle TFT screen. However, they had mounted a phone holder on the handlebars and I had brought ear buds so I was able to progarm the route back to the hotel. But before I did that, I spent about an hour riding around the outskirts of town which included some time doing figure eights in a parking lot and I was happy with the bike's ability to do a tight turn. Much tighter than my motorcycle at home.
All in all, the bike doesn't seem too challenging and even though I had had a few reservations about the seat height, it isn't too bad. I can get both heels on the ground lightly though pushing the bike backwards was something I couldn't achive on even a gentle slope. However, that might be the case on any motorcycle. Oh, the other thing is that it is a challenge to get off the bike and swing my leg over the seat and not get caught up on the top case. When I brought the bike back to the hotel, Nan and I sat on it together and we quickly realized getting on and off was going to take some practice for both of us.
While I ws doing that monkey business, Nan went for a visit to the Museum of Decorative Arts, set in a grand building from 1897 housing jewelry, clocks, ceramics, glass textiles, historical art and the evolution of art throughout time. I have attached her submissions, taken while there.
We connected mid afternoon, and started to make ready for the motorcycle portion of the trip, picked up the laundry, went for dinner then packed. Made a hotel reservation for tomorrow for Brno with plans to stop and see a castle along the way. We have scaled back the ambition of the trip as we don't need to ride so far to see something interesting so we don't actually expect to spend much time out of Czechia and we have built in a couple of flex days. After suffering through two weeks of a heat wave, the weather has taken a turn so we may be getting our pay back on this portion.