Damn, I’m beat. My fingers are stiff, my arms feel like they are going to fall off, my back hurts and my face is burning. It sounded so easy. 20km, downstream, by canoe. We started off at about 9:30 and after numerous groundings and turning around in circles, less than 50% of which were my fault, IMHO, but my opinion tends to be a minority one in my family, we finally finished the course at 5:30, in serious pain.
Český Šternberk
But, I’ll definitely be doing it again. Beautiful scenery, the kids had a great time ( they liked going over the weirs best, there were 7 or 8 of them and each was a little bit like a flume ride at a theme park and one we got caught by the current and carried over backwards), and it was more exercise than I’ve had in a long time.
Saturday, we arrived, set up camp – kind of a primitive campground, chemical toilets and no showers that we saw, but it was a pretty spot, and we set up our tent right by the river. Then we went for a walk around Český Šternberk, the castle and the town. We saw a restaurant heading in, and decided we’d have dinner there, but it was still only 2 o’clock or so. We walked up to the castle, watched the guy talk about the owls and eagles and other birds they have there but passed on the castle tour. It was more than I wanted to spend and my experience with castle tours is that the best part is the view from the outside, which you get for free.
So, then, we were just taking a walk through a forest and Sam was saying, “this is boring, this is boring, I want to go back to the camp and play football,” and I told him how my father used to take all of us kids out mushroom hunting and I hated mushrooms and hated looking for them because it was boring and now it’s my favorite thing to do. Boring, he said. It’s just a forest, and we’re just walking through it.
We came to a fork in the road then and both the kids wanted to turn back but I was in righteous parental wrath mode and wanted to press on and my wife, in a spirit of compromise, suggested a place just a kilometer away where we could get a snack and then turn back.
Well, after about an hour of looking for that, we turned back, and when we got to the restaurant we’d seen on the way up, it was definitely time for dinner.
Some day that kid will appreciate a good walk in the woods, damn it.
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