And so the journey begins....

Arrived in Prague safely. The check in counter in Madrid was what felt like 2kms away from the where you disembark the train. To give you some idea the counter numbers started at 399 and went down to one, and only ran on one side of the terminal. I was at counter 2. Lucky me!

Anyway arrived in Prague and caught up with my folks, brother and his girl. The hotel we were staying at has a bit of a rep for thin walls. Well that was proved that night with the guy verbally abusing his girl at all hours of the night. It was so clear that you could have sworn that he was in the same room as you. No matter, that is what you get when you don´t check the reviews

The next day we all headed up to Spindlerov Mlyn for a week of skiing. Spindlerov Mlyn is at the top of Czech rep, it just abouts borders Poland. A fantastic place. It has just about everything and puts Aussie ski resorts to shame. Don´t think I would want to be there in the winter though, it gets down to -30 deg C, while we were there it was a sizzling 6 deg C. We were there in the last week of skiing and there was still plenty of snow around, and there were tons of parties on, even on the slopes. These people know how to drink. A special mention goes to Scuba guy. There was a fancy dress party on one of the slopes. This guy was dressed in a wetsuit, snorkle and all, as a tank he had a empty water fountain bottle, but he had filled this with beer. At the end of the day there was just a little bit sloshing around in the bottom. Very cool.

The skiing is pretty hard here, the so called beginners slopes are probably intermediate by Aussie standards, even the ski instructors were saying they are a bit hard for the classing.

On one of the days it hailed while we were on the chair lift, those little suckers really hurt when they hit the tip of your nose. Surrived the hail storm, and the weather cleared up to be top skiing the next couple of days till we left.

On the Monday we left, and headed back to Prague. We all did a bit of site seeing that afternoon, as my brother and his girl were heading back to England and the rest of us were trying to plan the mad rush to the South West of France for Easter, where we were going to meet some of our relatives for the first time. So not long in Prague, unfortuneatly, but I will be back.

Tuesday morning, we headed off to a little town called Cesky Kromlov. This place is wicked, so glad we did a bit of a detour to come here. But as time is was pressing we only stayed one night there and left early in the morning. Kromlov is this little town with great old building that are still being used for every purposes. It isn´t that touristy yet, thankfully, I just hope it doesn´t. I will be coming back to this place again. Another special mention goes to the hostel that we stayed at, Kromlov House, this place is tops!

Wednesday we headed off and onto Austria.