The Cougar Patrol

Well, it’s been almost 6 months now, so I might as well post the pictures form Prague. Prague was amazingly fun. Everything you hear about this place is completely true. It was also cold as hell. My god, I can’t believe how cold it got. Yet again, the snow never melted off the ground, especially when I got out to the countryside. The Czech Republic had awesome beer, interesting food (which I ate all of). It’s certainly an old place, with a whole lot of interesting architecture to check out. I highly recommend a visit someday.


Anyways, here’s a couple shots and explanations for the things I did when I was there.





I got into the city at about 6 am. It has a decent sized train station, and it struck me as being a LOT less sketchy than the one in Budapest. I would come back here for my beer trip.

This is Stare Mesto, the main square of the old area in downtown Prague. There was a lot of activity going on around here; you can see some of the stalls for the Christmas Festival that was going on that week. That was a fun festival, but I didn’t really get any shots of it.

This clock is an astronomical clock, built by Copernicus. Yeah, it’s old. It tells the positions of the stars and planets in relation to the time of day and date.

This is the East tower of the Charles Bridge, which is the one with all the statues that crosses the Vltava. In layman’s terms, it’s where Vin Diesel ended up at the end of XXX.

This is the top of Wenceslas Square. Yes, that Wenceslas, of the Christmas carol, was once king of Bohemia, and his castle is the big on top of the hill. This is the modern, Times Square-like area in fron of the National Museum.

That’s pretty much most of the stuff I saw on the first day. Then it was off to the bars. The next morning, I got up REALLY early, and proceeded to the train station again, for the trip to the southwest. I was planning a long two stop trip, to Karlstjen Castle, and the Pilsner Urquell brewery, is the city of Plzen.

As you can see the trip out went through some extremely frosty country. The entire area had a gray pall about it, with frost crystals on all the plants and trees, giving it a whitish look, sort of like on e of the dream sequences in LOTR.


Karlstejn Castle used to hold the crown jewels of the Bohemian kings, and stand high up on a mountain top. It has a great position for defense of the castle, although it was never seriously attacked. These pics should give an idea of how high up it is.

This is the Pilsner Urquell Brewery. Obviously, it was a cool place to visit.


The first stop on the tour, the Beer Train! Hey those Coors light ads aren’t fake after all.





Underground sits a massive complex of tunnels carved out of the rock. They’re here to store the beer and keep it refrigerated. The tunnels were a huge maze, and it’d be easy to get lost in them without a guide. Following the tunnels brings us to…

The Giant Beer Barrels! As you can see, these things were huge, and filled with pure, unfiltered pilsner beer. For a taste test, they stick in a spigot right into the barrel, and pour you a fresh 34 degree beer. Tasted like heaven.

The next day I went off to visit Prague Castle. This is the largest castle in Europe, and it's really old. Somehow, it made it through WWII unscathed, and so it remains in pretty much the same shape it's historically been in.

The entire object on the top of the hill is the castle. It's REALLY big.

Here's another view from the middle of the Vltava on an island park that I took the first morning. You can see how absolutely fogged in this whole place was during my visit. Surprisingly, the nighttime wasn't so bad.

This is prague from the top of the castle hill looking down. Pretty old city, lots of twisting roads and all. Very interesting.

This is the Church of St. Vitus. It's the main church in the castle (the one seen in the above castle photos) and it was huge. A very impressive place, with lots of historical crypts and chapels inside of it.

Here's the inside of the church. As you can see, it was a rather large building. Very interestign place to be in.

Well that's it for this trip. There was a ton of fun stuff that went down, but obviously we can discuss a lot of it in a family friendly blog. at least, I think this blog is family friendly...