Czechia Road Trip, Part 3: České Budějovice to Telč

Day 418 (August 20, 2019) – Telč, Czechia

Continuing our Czechia road trip, we left České Budějovice for Třeboň, a small town on a lake. We had a great lunch of vegetable soup, meatloaf, and mashed potatoes in a small restaurant in the basement of Třeboň Castle. The meatloaf was their menu of the day and about half the price of anything else so we couldn’t refuse. It was a good choice though. They even put a bottle of ketchup on the table, which we hadn’t seen in the longest time. Europe has a habit of charging for every little side of sauce ordered, so this ketchup bottle on the table seemed very generous of them. The restaurant decor was entertaining, decorated completely in the whole medieval castle theme with wooden benches, animal furs, and antlers decorating the walls.

A small piece of Třeboň castle.

Svet Lake, at the edge of Třeboň.

We took a walk partway around the lake, past Třeboň’s famous fish farms, to see the Schwarzenberg tomb. It looked like a miniature Gothic church (although still significantly larger than a house) in the middle of a wooded park. The Schwarzenbergs were a prominent aristocratic family who owned castles and land all over the modern day Czechia, Germany, and Austria. They also, apparently, had money to burn on their afterlife accommodations. 

The Schwarzenberg tomb.

We ended our time at a coffee shop in Třeboň’s long and skinny town square. That’s where we learned that at outdoor cafes, any unused seat is an available seat. Usually when you sit down at a restaurant, your table is considered your table and any unused seats are also your seats. But when outdoor seating is at a premium, tables are shared among everyone in the Czech Republic. It is in no way unusual to take a couple seats at someone else’s table if they’re open.

The Třeboň town square.

We ended our day by arriving in Telč. Our hotel check-in seemed a bit sketchy. We showed up where we were supposed to be and knocked on the door. The woman didn’t speak any English, but we gathered that we were supposed to wait for someone else to show up, so we took a seat in the park across the street. The other person finally appeared, and with a very bizarre mix of basic English and German he told us to follow him in his car. We followed him as he took us across to the opposite side of town. This is not where we were expecting our accommodation to be, but after seeing it we decided it wasn’t a problem for us. We were essentially staying in our own wood-paneled cabin. It was huge with a dining table big enough to seat a dozen people and a spiral staircase leading to a second floor where there were four beds (plus a fifth on the first floor). An entire family could have easily stayed there, yet it was only the two of us.

Our "little" cabin, which could sleep at least five people.

Telč was surprisingly pretty. There was an extremely long square lined with dozens of colorful buildings, each with a different styled façade. There was a lake on one side of town that was packed with fish and birds and, in calm weather, reflected the image of town’s skyline. 

In Telč's main square.

I think at this point, after being in the Czechia for nearly two weeks, the novelty of the Czech food was wearing off a bit. We branched out in Telč and went out for burritos one night and pizza the next, both of which seemed to be quite popular. However, we never got tired of the Czech beer. We spent both nights sitting outside in the town square with a beer in hand as the sun went down.