A Day Apart

5 hours is a fast time to hike/run 32+ km, but that doesn't mean it's fast enough. This is especially true when you're bus leaves after 4 hours and 55 minutes, and though my legs protested, I hurried down the trail from Kravi Hora wondering if I would need to hitchhike.

Morgan and I set aside yesterday as a day to do our own things, and I chose to take a bus an hour south to Vissy Brod, a town near the Austrian border, and get some hiking in the foothills. It was a very nice day, and I was ready to get cranking. I left the town and headed up, expecting to be alone in the woods. While I didn't see any people, I was surprised to see a lot of religious artifacts during the course of my hike. In the first 2 km, a relatively steep uphill trail to an ancient monastary and chapel, there where markers indicating the stations of the cross. There's no time like the present, so I took the chance to have some quiet prayer and reflection (something I don't do nearly enough these days).



On the map the different trails are indicated by different colors, and I switched from the green path over to the yellow, with a mind to find some good viewpoints and head down the red trail. Even though trails are marked with a colored symbol to let you know you're on the right rack, it is easy to get lost. Sometimes trails intersect with other trails or primitive logging roads, and sometimes they are the roads themselves. If you're not careful, you can be walking down a road and miss a hidden little path that you are supposed to spur off onto.






Sure enough, this happened to me on the way down, and by the time I made it back to Vissy Brod I only had two hours to hike the 12k up and over to Rozmberk before the bus left. Legs already aching, I tackled the hike. After tempting fate by taking the spur to Kravi Hora (Devil's Rock) I emerged onto a public road and followed it to town. After quickly checking the bus schedules, my bus rolled in ready to take me back to Cesky Krumlov in time to keep Morgan from worrying. Whew!