Thanks to experiencing a looong string of grey days, BW and I became accustomed to leaving our sunglasses at home. Thus, when we walked outside yesterday, we squinted like moles and shrank back toward the door. "I'd almost forgotten what a sunny sky looks like," BW said, slinking back into our flat in a Vampire-esque manner. A few minutes later, a layer of clothing less, and donning sunglasses, we set off for Prague's Petrin Hill, a destination we chose for the purpose of relishing Fall colors.
You can walk up the roughly 1,000 ft-high hill, but we hopped the Petrin Funicular, instead, along with dozens of Czech families with strollers, grandparents and dogs in tow.
Here's the funicular in the 1930s, and it doesn't look that different today.
At the top there were row after row of rosebushes in every variety of red, pink and white imaginable. It was like Valentine's Day had exploded. What a treat to see them before Autumn laid them to rest for the Winter.
Here's the funicular in the 1930s, and it doesn't look that different today.
 |
| From dpp.cz, the Prague Department of Public Transport |
Walking onward, we came to Petrin's famous Lookout Tower, which was modeled after the Eiffel Tower and built in 1891. We split a monstrous klobasa in a beer garden in the tower's shadow and then decided against scaling it. There were also a couple of churches and a mirror maze in the vicinity.
Unfortunately, a lot of the Fall color we'd come to see was already on the ground, but the walk was lovely, nonetheless. Jayda lapped up the off-leash area we discovered further north along the hill.
And the views were stupidly spectacular.
We said hello to the statue of Our Lady in Exile and the Strahov Monastery before heading back down to city life.
Want to see the inside of the Monastery's library? It was featured in an episode of The Bachelorette:
