Day 3

We had breakfast in Penzion Rokytka where we also spent the night. The owners, a nice young Dutch couple found this place about 2 years ago. The building was a complete wreck so they renovated everything inside out, built a state-of-the art kitchen, new bathrooms, created a beautiful garden and opened this penzion. They have a lot of guests from the Netherlands, lots of Germans and Czechs, of course.

After breakfast, we said goodbye to J&M and drove to Liberec. Unfortunately, it started to rain so we didn’t walk very much there. We decided to drive to the medieval town of Kutna Hora in a somewhat roundabout way to see 4 other properties on the way. The first place was in the village of Volfartice, near the Luzyckie Mountains and a little town of Ceska Lipa. Unfortunately, the real estate ads don’t give you the address so we drove through the village looking at the picture and trying to match the house since houses don’t even have “for sale” sign. First we drove through extremely narrow roads of what we thought was Volfartice until we met a young woman who informed us that this was a new part of the village, but V. proper was I km away. When we got there, it turned out to be a big, spread out village so there was no way we could identify the house. Luckily, we saw a house with a “for sale “ sign so we stopped and started walking around the property hoping that the owner will get out of the house and ask us what we want. That’s exactly what happened. The house turned out not to be the one we were looking for, but it was for sale and the owner let us in and showed it to us. It was actually a pretty good house, probably the best we’ve seen --- reasonably updated, big, lots of space downstairs and upstairs, a huge, nice lot. The bonus was that a house down the road is owned by a woman from Prague and her Australian husband. We called the agent of the second house for sale, but he was in Prague so he could get there to show it to us so we decided to keep driving.

We stopped for lunch/dinner (obiad) in the old town of Ceska Lipa and proceeded to the next house in the village of Zahradky. Again, we just had the picture of the house, but we knew it was in the village center so we found it easily. The village was quite lovely, with a huge palace and quaint narrow streets, but the house was located in what we thought looked like a village dump --- in between something that looked like an abandoned warehouse and an electric transformer. Not good. Then, we decided we had enough of house hunting for one day, and it was getting late so we decided to just drive to Kutna Hora.

We arrived at about 5 pm, parked the car and walked in search of a hotel.. We stopped in 2 or 3 hotels before we found the right one -- hotel Medinek -- with a huge room, great location and wifi. We wandered around the historical core of the silver mining town of Kutna Hora a bit, saw the famous church of Saint Barbara, patron of the miners built in the 14th century. We also saw a very modern squash club (Al was impressed). The town was pretty dead in the evening so we went to a café, had some delicious pastry and called it a night.