Relaxing

From Cesky Budeovice we headed off to Plzen. When we got there we got a bit lost & drove around the city for a while. The road that we needed to go down was closed due to road works so this caused us a bit of problem. Eventually we found the campsite we wanted to go to but it was closed! We decided the Plzen didn't look so good after all our driving around. Very dirty & nothing very different to any other city we have been to so we decided to move on to a Frantiskovy Lazne which is on the far western side of Czech, reasonably near to the German border.

The site was nice with it's own private lake for swimming in the summer & it had lots of fish. It would have been quite a quiet site if it wasn't for the two dogs that the owner had locked up near the gate. Who were very noisy every time another dog or person walked by - which became quite annoying. We liked it anyway & the site had some old alloys wheels on legs which you could use to build fires on which was fun. We decided to stay there for a week & relax without the time limit to get to Munich before Oktoberfest finished! The local town was quite quiet in the morning but then later on was full with old people & had nothing but shops selling clothes for old people & spas. The spas were ok & we tried water from most of them but it didn't taste that nice! We only spent an afternoon there.

The next day we had to take a bus trip to the next nearest town called Cheb to look for a bucket as we ran over our other bucket for our waste water whilst we were putting the van on to chocks! We found one & Matt managed to find a guitar something he has been whinging about for ages! He didn't bring his guitar to save on space & just took his ukelele which we are both getting sick off! So now he has his guitar he is happy! There was nothing else to do in this town other than shop, but we did get the train from Cheb to Karlovy Vary - an other spa town. The buses in Czech are very old & on this train we had our own private cabin - Matt said it reminded him of James Bond!

Karlovy Vary is a more upmarket spa town than Frantiskovy Lazne with loads more tourists. We tried some of the spa water which was hot this time so was a bit nicer & just looked around the town. It had some nice architecture but loads of shops selling rubbish souvenirs. We only spent an afternoon here. The rest of the week was spent hanging around the campsite. We went for a couple of walks & hired bikes from the campsite which were really uncomfortable! We spent one day at the Aquaforum which was a big swimming complex with Jacuzzis, a flume, a couple of outdoor pools, one of which was really hot & was really nice.