It was all OK in the end.

Most vacations have at least one "bad" day, yes? When things go wrong, flights are delayed, something important lost, a family fight...something. Until yesterday, my trip had been astonishingly free of such things; sure, our flight to Krakow was cancelled and we had to wait, but it was pleasant waiting and in the end no real harm was done.

And yesterday started out just fine...breakfast at our B&B in Berlin, easy trip to the main train station, and a beautiful 5 hour train ride through southern Germany to Prague.

Once we arrived, our main task was to find the hotel where our rental car awaited, then drive about 2.5 hours to a little town called Cesky Krumlov. Now, there are rumors, based on some truth, that travelers to the Czech Republic would do well to use caution - count your change carefully, don't trust taxi drivers at the train stations, etc. We got off the train, got money from the ATM, and Donica headed to the WC, where she was promptly given incorrect change for the 50 crown charge to use the facility. She caught the "mistake", though, and the woman pretended it hadn't happened. We then had a tense exchange with a man trying to get us to take his friend's taxi...which we did after a little bargaining, since our other options were either confusing or too difficult. The taxi ride involved some fair amount of swerving and swearing, but was over soon enough. We got to the hotel, but our rental car wasn't ready....and we weren't finally on the road until almost 2 hours after arriving on the train.

The drive wasn't too bad - it was threatening rain the whole time, but we found the town easily enough. Daniel the GPS continues to be helpful. :) What we couldn't find was our B&B. Cesky Krumlov is tiny, with oh-so-narrow cobbled pedestrian streets. Eventually, I squeezed the car into one street that was too narrow at the other end to get out. We were stuck - really stuck - since I couldn't figure out how to get the car into reverse. (This sounds dumb, I know, and I felt dumb. But I've never driven a stick where you have to push the lever down and jerk it over to get into reverse, which is up next to 1st gear. I had to google this to find it out.)

I sent Donica on foot to find our place and hopefully bring back help. She was gone for about 10 minutes, during which time the threatening rain turned into a downpour. But she came back with our B&B owner, who spoke very little English, and was very kind. I managed to communicate that it would be best if he just drove us out of there. He quickly reversed out of the alley (to my astonishment and shame), and then to our surprise drove completely out of town and back in a different way. We'd have had no chance to find this place...but no matter, we'd arrived. We unloaded our luggage, he closed the doors of the car, and then told me I needed to park the car up the street a little ways. OK, no problem, I gestured for the keys. Keys? Where were the keys? He didn't have them. But there they were, in the locked car, in the ignition! Unbelievable.

He said he would "call someone", I sent Donica off to get something to eat, (it was past 9 pm), and I tried to hold back tears as I wondered how much "calling someone" would cost, at this time of night, far from a main town. Plus I was tired, and hungry, and still the rain came down. After repeated peeks out the window of our room down to the street (see photo above), I heard some voices and headed downstairs to see our host with a guy in overalls and some interesting wedges and other tools working on the passenger side door of the car. I can't say exactly what they did, but it did involve a slim jim sort of thing at the end, I heard the click, and the car was unlocked. Huge relief. But then I watched as between the two of them they rolled down the window and sort of pushed and bent the door frame back into place (gulp), then after a few more adjustments looked at each other and nodded. The overall guy lit a cigarette, I tried to ask him if he'd come from a far way and make conversation, but he said "My English, very small". "My Czech, also very small", I said, and asked how much I needed to pay. 200 crowns - that he said very decisively - and I ran upstairs to get it. At about 20 crowns per dollar, it was about one tenth what I'd been mentally prepared for, so that ended up being the best thing that happened all day.

We can only go up from here!