Day 2 – Czech out!

Day two was as much a blur as day 1. Most of Germany and the CZech republic wizzed by, with only the occasional petrol stop and caffeine stop to pass the time. We did see things starting to change though, German toilets started giving way to pay-per-entry Czech toilets. Red bull started giving way to strangely labelled caffeinated sugar cans. 98RON fuel disappeared entirely and 95 became ubiquitous. Euros turned to strange notes we didn’t know… but eventually, we made it to Prague.

At this point, we remembered that the Czech out party was Black Tie. Luckily we came prepared. Elena had a big red ball gown and I had a velvet tux… perfect. Except the ball gown was too heavy, so we had to ‘modify’ it with a MoraKniv (shout out to the Swedes out there) and cut off bits. In public. With a few Czech construction workers looking. Ah well…

Once the party started, we realized the theme that the adventurists went for. Weird, odd and strange. The party was in an abandoned train station, with tracks still in place… and the musicians were on train cars. The musicians included some burlesque acts, a few OAPs singing songs from their childhood, fire breathers, people on stilts and acrobats. All coupled with some pretty potent Czech absinthe (which the lady at the counter said “wasn’t a good idea to drink”) and a strange plant that looked a lot like weed made for a surreal evening.

Some teams were nervous for what was to come, some were scared as their car had broken down already, while others didn’t care either way as long as there was a party. We fell into the nervous category, so went to sleep at a reasonably 2am with an intention to leave at 6am. What we hadn’t taken into account were other teams.

The first encounter saw a team from Hong Kong try to convince me to drive to Morocco, and then do Northern Africa to Syria before heading to Turkey… hummmm…
The second encounter saw two drunk people fall on our tent, and land squarely on Elena, who was so tired she barely woke up. She rolled over, mumbled something and fell asleep again.
The third encounter, at 6-7am made us realize that being early isn’t a good thing. We were blocked. During the night, more teams arrived and blocked our car squarely in the parking lot.

Funnily, two workers from the train station turned up at 7am, and started shaking people and waking them up – shouting in Czech and saying “no parking”. Most people, either still too drunk or too hungover to care, just fell asleep again. One group woke up enough to move their car, so we saw our opening and escaped.