I’m much less excited to get up for our morning tour now that I feel I have already given myself a pretty good Prague tour thanks to my Lonely Planet guidebook, plus I’m exhausted and it’s about 20 degrees colder than it was during our wandering yesterday. Luckily, the rain holds off for our two-hour tour, which also shows us the Municipal House, Powder Tower and the Jewish Quarter.
I can tell the other tour-goers are getting tired, too – slowly but steadily, they break away from the group, heading out to the Lennon Wall, Prague Castle and other destinations. We hold out till the end though when it starts raining, and then a few of us find a restaurant to get some lunch, wine and beers.
READ: Venizia, la citta di amore
Unlike our tour with Affordable Asia to Thailand last year (which is now known as Affordable World) Mike and I are around the youngest people on the tour, with many of them being in their 50s and 60s. Despite the age difference, though, Mike and I are having a great time with this rambunctious crowd. One thing I always find interesting about meeting fellow travelers is that they never look like the way you expect them to – they’re hiding amongst you in average clothes, normal haircuts and various accents. Rarely are they dreadlocked, patched up nomads like portrayed in the movies.
Instead, a group of 50-year-old women we are hanging out with are moms, business owners and former secretaries who simply have a big sense of curiosity and a penchant for wine. Upon some questioning, however, they’re much more interesting than your average neighborhood woman.
READ: To the motherland
After two glasses of Czech wine and a pork, sausage and vegetable skewer, I’m feeling much more energized and I don’t even care that it’s pouring. We wander through the streets for another hour or so with the women, chatting about how much we love travel and shopping, before breaking off once again back to the hotel, where we can relax a little before dinner tonight.
Tonight is our group’s farewell dinner at a restaurant in the suburbs of Prague, which shuts down for our group, probably because there are so many of us. Mike and I both order a duck leg, which is amazing, and as we sip more wine we become more conscious of the strange paintings that adorn the walls, including that of a T-Rex, before we hop back on the bus and go back to the hotel.
Although I know that this will be my first (and last) stint of solid sleep for our entire journey, I can’t believe it’s already over and tomorrow, we will get on a plane from Prague to Zurich and another to Newark before we head home. Since we came back from Thailand last March, we had been going back and forth about where we should go and what we should do for our yearly trip. After all of our planning, only 10 days later and it’s over, with another year to wait until our next one together.
I guess that’s the good part about travel though – there’s always somewhere new to go and another country to check off your list. I’m lucky enough that on this trip, I was able to check off four of them.
Life Aboard the Traveling Circus 