Day 254 Tues 26 Jun 2007 Olomouc to Prague, Czech Republic

It’s time to get moving if we are ever to make it through Scandinavia so we head to Prague via the world heritage sites of Litomysl castle, an Italian style palace where they are dismantling the remains of a Smetena festival in the castle courtyard and Kutna Hora with its Church of St Barbara. The church which is supported by an array of flying buttresses has a very unusual roof consisting of three black conical spires which look very gothic and Gormonghast–like. There’s also a silver mine and an ossuary to explore for those who have time.

We get to Prague in the rush hour and find the place in the old town with keys for our apartment which is beneath the castle. We unload the car and return to find it’s been clamped – 40,000kms and we get our first parking ticket. I2 remonstrates and bargains the unclamping fee down from 2000Kc to 500Kc. Still, the apartment's very spacious, light and airy and well equipped so after hugging the washing machine we venture out for dinner of duck, rabbit and dumplings in a nearby restaurant.

Watching CNN we discover much of southern Europe has been suffering an unprecedented heatwave with 46deg in Greece whilst N Europe has been deluged with massive floods in UK and Germany. We put it down to excellent planning that we have so far managed to avoid all the excesses of climate change, moving north across the alps just in time to escape the heat and westwards sufficiently slowly to avoid the most of the rains. Although admittedly our wet day index has increased to 13 from 8 (that's out of a total of 254), having been forced to buy a Mozart umbrella in Salzburg, we escaped the cold of Tibet and the heat of Rajasthan, got though Turkey without getting stuck in the snow, more than once, and made it over the Alps without chains. Now in Czeckia it's ideal sightseeing weather, bright and sunny but not too hot.