Czechia Road Trip, Part 1: Prague to Pilsen

Day 413 (August 15, 2019) – Pilsen, Czechia

We wanted to explore more of Czechia than just Prague, so we rented a car for two weeks and drove around the country. The rental car was surprisingly inexpensive, costing us less than $17 a day (a lot less than when we rented a car in New Zealand), and it allowed us to go wherever we wanted when we wanted. No waiting for trains or buses. The freedom felt a little strange at first, but we quickly got used to it.

Our tiny Skota Citigo. It got us everywhere we needed at 50 miles to the gallon. It's not electric. It's just a tiny, light-weight, gasoline-powered car. It was comfortable too. We had plenty of space inside and we could park it anywhere.

We picked up our tiny, silver Skoda Citigo from the Prague train station. We hadn’t heard of Skoda before, a Czech car manufacturer, but after seeing our car we realized that they were everywhere around Europe. Our first experience with the car was turning it on and it immediately and violently jumping forward a foot and a half towards the concrete wall of the parking lot. It scared us half to death. Travis forgot that he was driving a manual car. Oops, hah. Nothing like starting a road trip by almost crashing into a wall before you’ve left the parking lot. We did manage to escape the parking spot intact, navigate out of the narrow city roads of Prague, and make it onto the Czech Republic’s empty country roads.

Most of Czechia was covered with farmland. Most days on the road were hot and sunny and felt very much like summer.

But other days were windy and chilly and felt much more like fall. We were always driving past farms.

For the most part, driving around Czechia was easy. Of course, I say that with Travis driving all the time, but compared to other places we’ve been it really wasn’t that bad. There was very little traffic, not many confusing intersections, and parking was never hard to find. 

The hardest part of driving was figuring out the road signs. I think the road signs of Czechia are similar to most places in Europe, but we didn't find them very intuitive. A negative is indicated by a red circle rather than a red cross like in the US. The red circle seems like a more subtle warning than a cross does, so it was hard to remember sometimes. Speed limits are rarely, if ever, posted. However, in the few rare instances when they are posted they are done so inside a red circle, making them even more confusing. So does that sign with a red circle mean the limit is 80 km/h or is NOT 80 km/h? The speed limit is implied by the type of road: motorway, normal road, or town road. On normal roads through the countryside, where we most often drove, a town sign indicates that the speed limit is reduced and the sign saying that you’ve left the town indicates that the speed limit is back to normal again, but the speed limit itself is never posted. We ended up downloading the Czech road sign Wikipedia page to my phone so we could look up all the signs we were passing. We got used to it after a couple weeks, but there were a lot of instances of us laughing at the road signs we saw thinking, ok, now what on earth is that supposed to mean? My favorite where the double negative signs, where a prohibition was now prohibited. What does that even mean? Certainly there could have been a better way to communicate that. We just drove slowly and hoped for the best.

Highway signs looked no different than at home. It was the signage around towns that got confusing at times and a lack of posted speed limits took a while to get used to.

We covered a lot of ground and saw many different places in our two weeks, but the routine became a bit too repetitive to write about every location in great detail so posts for the next two weeks are much heavier on the pictures and lighter on the words. We spent most of our time walking around towns, castles, and gardens, taking lots of photos, eating at the most local and popular Czech restaurants we could find, and drinking Czech beer in the evenings. Czechia was remarkably homogeneous. In every town we visited, the architecture was similar, there was always a town square that was the center of activity, there were plenty of great Czech restaurants, a local brewery that everyone preferred, and churches or town halls with bell towers that could be scaled for a small fee.  We moved to a new town every two to three days, stopping at other towns in between and taking the occasional day trip.

Our first Czech meal outside of Prague. Meat and potatoes. 

Walking through the town of Karlštejn.

Karlštejn Castle.

Our first stop after leaving Prague was Karlštejn Castle. Karlšteijn is supposed to be one of the best-preserved castles in the Czech Republic and probably one of the most visited because it is not far from Prague and it’s been kept in great shape since the 1300s. It really looks like a castle you’d expect to see in a fairy tale. It’s on top of a huge hill that overlooks the town of Karlštejn in the valley below. There are spires and towers and defensive walls and everything else you’d expect. We took a tour of the inside too, which was perfect timing for us because a rain cloud passed overhead while we were inside, drenching everyone else who hadn't found cover in time.

The view from Karlštejn Castle of the town below.

After Karlštejn, we continued on to Pilsen where we spent a couple nights. It was our first small town experience in Czechis, and it didn’t disappoint. There was a very nice town square with a church in the center where we climbed up the bell tower to get a view of the city below. 

The buildings all around Czechia were interesting to look at. This was just a school in Pilsen, but it looked more like a fancy estate to me.

Pilsen had some very cool public art, like these upside down legs in the pond.

Cathedral of St. Bartholomew in the center of Pilsen.

At the top of Pilsen's Cathedral of St. Bartholomew.

The view of Pilsen's main square from the top of the cathedral's bell tower.

The highlight of Pilsen was, of course, our tour of the Pilsner Urquell Brewery. The brewery has been around for hundreds of years and is where the pilsen-style beer was first created. The brewery is just on the edge of town along a river, but the land area of the brewery is probably larger than the town itself. It’s a huge operation. We saw the tanks where the beer was brewed and the bottling and canning lines in operation. We also walked through their underground storage cellars and had a taste of their limited-quantity barrel-brewed Pilsner Urquell, where they continue to reproduce the original recipe to the best of their ability, including the fermentation of the beer in the same cellars where it all started.

The entrance to the Pilsner Urquell brewery.

The Pilsner Urquell bottling factory.

This is a batch of the original Pilsner Urquell recipe, brewed in open-topped wood barrels. The underground caves are at a constant temperature so they measure the temperature of the beer to assess fermentation progress. 

Enjoying a glass of beer in the Pilsner Urquell underground tunnels.