Walking Tour from Radotin to Cernosice and back

I wanted to catch the train to see the horse races at Chuchle and hopped the incoming train to Smichov  where people reassured me that it was a local to stop at the horsetrack.


It took off. Trees passed by as well as houses. It always looks this way on the inside of a train as if you're in the eye of a moving hurricane. And then the racetrack whizzed by. The train rumbled on despite my groans.

I hadn't bought a ticket for the fare and the conductress was coming  down the aisle with her ticket puncher.  Sometimes they punch, sometimes they scribble, but no matter what, they always collect.

Groan. Now what? I reached into my pocket to rattle some loose coins. Did I really want to go all the way to-- what was the next stop? Temporary panic seized me. Was it an express to Beroun?  Oh great and the tickets cost double on the train.


Where did the city limits end? Could I just sneak off at the next stop without  getting a ticket? Would I ever be so lucky?


Metro cards in Prague are good for all transportation within the city limits. so you can hop a train and enter the horsetrack free just by showing your monthly metro ticket, but the train  bypassed my itinerary. Sometimes it's like that.

So the next best thing to do is a little bit of unplanned exploration of an area I've never visited: Radotin was the next stop and the conductress was very busy with the people at the other end of the car. With a few wobblies, I hopped off and loped over to the station with the hope that there would be a Tourist Map on the wall.


Many train stations decorate  their walls with special maps which show  the local walking trails so that you can go out and get properly lost.  The maps can be  quite old which means that the markings on the maps and the reality of the trails can be quite beguiling, if not downright misleading. I won't bother to tell you of the day, I decided to walk back from Cercany to Ricany, a distance of about 40km as crow flies and more than that if I decided to crisscross every field and rill to visit every little village on the way...


...and each trail was marked with a reassuring sign that Ricany was only 7km further away. It was  past 11pm when I crawled into town and I caught the last train pulling out to Prague. I was home by 1:00am and not even a beer  in hand.


So I am well-experienced in this game and folks often are astounded when they find out that I did a 30km walk without a map around in the woods off by some place I'd never been before.

But Radotin definitely did not look like my kind of place. First of all, it has a huge cement works and quarry owned by Heidelberg Zement.  That  indicates the ultimate in boredom and dust. But the river had to be nearby and I could walk back to Chuchle which was equally boring or down to Cernosice where I'd never walked before. I had  frequently ridden my bike around  through the area. Needless to say, walking and riding are rather two different things. When you're on a bike, you begin to hallucinate and think you are flying and 80km is no big deal.

When you walk,  particularly on bitumin or blacktop or asphalt, whatever it happens to be, your ankles begin to hurt and in my  case the ligaments in my pelvis can get  badly inflamed from the unyielding surface.  So  after a browse round, I discovered no tourist map and obligingly pulled mine out of my bag and squinted at it.


Moreover to my relief, I discovered by the metro plan on the wall and time schedule that Radotin is the final stop  for the net metro ticket, so the conductress  didn't get cheated after all.


And I wouldn't have to buy a ticket for my return trip home. That fulfilled the plan of the day of not  buying a second train ticket in two days. Economy plan-- I could go back to Benesov or Srbsko during the week, but by now I have a list of castles and places to go that the list can't possibly be fulfilled.


Which only reinforces my tendency to return to the same place time over again and I never tired of Srbsko; besides there are great bugs there.



The main objective is to find the river and from there it's pie. just follow your nose like  Little Maruschka to Baba Yaga's house and you'll be fine. The next village or town is Cernosice so  can't miss it and only 7km away. That's really not far, so I calculated  the kiloometers posted on signs to come up with the possibility of walking to Cernosice over to Zbraslav and back to catch the train at Radotin, approximate 18-20km  and lumbered off. If terribly worn out, I could also catch the train in Zbrslav although that didn't appeal to my sensibilities. There's supposed to be something over there like a castle or palace or whatnot, but it meant  a longer way around Prague on the return trip and I really didn't feel like messing with castles and palaces and whatnot on  a day where my shoes wre already melting into the asphalt. Time to get moving.



The Beroun river is a culture all its own. The Czechs are weekend cowboys. They don their Army fatigues, cowboy hats, spurs and leather leggings and head for the hills  where they have little shanty cabins and go fishing or rock climbing during the summer. They don't  have to take much beer along, because the river if stocked with it. You can't go a half kilometer without a Staropramen or Kozel sign with a little shack underneath it that serves up the local greasy fare of  fried cheese, fried potatoes and sausage.

Other than the cowboys with their backpacks and guitars hanging off their backs, you  might meet  vodniks that fish in the river. They're as colorful as the cowboys and some of them nearly drink the  stock of beer right out of it.


Along the river, there wil be clusters of cottages  and small garden houses that have been built up for the locals to escape from the urban boredom to rural fantasy.  It makes it easier for the vodniks to dangle their lines out the windows rather than stand in the river.

And when the old fat cow fo the family gets tired of the  rest of the family, she can tell them where to go-- to the river so she can get some peace and quiet watching her tv show and clean the windows.

This is what I think and not necessarily how it goes.  As walks go, it  hit the middle. Not an 8 or 10 becasue there were too  many cyclists. And since it was Sunday, they were all wearing yellow jerseys and thinking that they were on the last stage of the Tour de France which was being held in another country--ostensibly France.


 Czech cyclists are even mroe aggressive than Czech hockey-players. In hockey at least there are penalties for sticking, but if you happen to be on a path that is "shared" with bikes, you're a dead duck,  a squashed bug,  a stomped slug, siomething to be run over and done over without the slightest swerve.  Even the  toddlers on wobbly wheels take a pernicious delight in ramming into you if they are given half a chance. This rather lowered the score on the attractiveness of the walk rather than the environment.

So it was an afternoon of  rabid-looking cyclists all determined to make the next time trials for the Tour de France in celebration of Armstrong's retirement and Ullrich's demise with doping charges.

For me, the Tour could wait, 'cause my man had already taken the jersey for King of the Mountains and that was that. Floyd Landis looked like he would keep the yellow and since I couldn't be there,  I couldn't much do anything about it either.



Rather than waste the day wondering who was going to take the yellow or white, might as well  go for a walk.  Not exactly revolutionary philosophy, but  at least it could  reduce a bit more flubber from my blubber.
 

Walkng reduces the strain on the brain. Instead of thinking about anything, you are looking at everything and wondering why you spend your life sitting in a dark corner with a computer. There's a world out there and suddenly you realize it comes in unlimited color that doesn't have to be displayed on a monitor.

So I met some ducks, saw some cawboys and vodniks and even  came across the little hut where Baba yaga lived before she was sent off into the dark forest to live in the hut on the single chicken leg-- or maybe I was mistaken and passed the witch's hut from some other tale. On the way back, the sky turned dark, the thunder rumbled, the bikes whizzed past and I still  trundled along. If I walked 7km sown to Cernosice, that meant an equal or longer trip back because I crossed the river and walked along the outskirts of Zbraslav through the fields. Several trees reminded me of the danger of thunderstorms.

And whatever you do, don't play gold in an electric storm.  There's nothing like a golf club to act as a lightning rod.


If you want to pretend you're Ben Franklin, go ahead and do it, but an acquaintance died that way last year.


Step by step, I  wandered back, crossed the bridge, greeted the church and then went for the obligatory beer. It could rain as far as I cared, because the train station was somewhere near and the walk was done.