Notes from My Trip

We left for Europe on April 12.  I was accompanied on this trip by one of my sister's friends from Pikeville, Kay Berkebile.  Kay and I had only met to book our flights prior to leaving on this trip.  She turned out to be a fine traveling companion.  I was very thankful to have her along.  She is an experienced international traveler, and she thought of many things that I would not have.

The first leg of our journey took us to Prague in the Czech Republic.  We were met at the airport by a friend of Penny's and a fellow missionary, Melissa Wells.  She accompanied us to our hotel where we encountered a problem with our room.  When we had booked the hotel, we had forgotten that although we were traveling on Tuesday, we wouldn't be to Prague until Wednesday night.  We booked our hotel for the wrong night.  Kay made several calls to try to correct the problem before we arrived, and Melissa even went to the hotel on Monday to try to straighten things out in advance of our arrival, but no luck.  When we arrived we were told that we would be charged for the night we had book originally.  Since they were so uncooperative with us, we decided not to spend the night there.

Melissa arranged other accommodations for us.  That's how we ended up in a Korean hostel.  Melissa had met the owner of the hostel in her language classes where they were both learning Czech.  The owner, Bryan, was a nice young man with fairly good English skills and the hostel was nice.  It included breakfast which turned out to be Korean fare.  Bryan's mom prepared squid, salad with homemade dressing, a beef dish, and some kind of seaweed soup.  It all tasted pretty good to me, but it certainly was a strange meal for breakfast.

Here are some of the highlights from our day in Prague.

The pictures above are all views of St. Vitus Cathedral in the center of Old Town Prague.

The impressive outside view of the cathedral

A beautiful view of the Vltava River

There were beautiful gardens everywhere.

Our Korean breakfast, squid in the center,
and I forgot about the beets.

Bryan, Kay and another guest, with Bryan's mom
in the background.  We invited Bryan to visit Tennessee
and he was very excited at the prospect.  Everywhere we went,
if we mentioned we were from Tennessee the response was
"Jack Daniels."