The Road to Prague

This is a picture of Brno taken from the train. I have heard about Brno for about 20 years now since Larry attended The World Puzzle Championship there. It's more developed now, but still not much of a tourist hangout.

Another shot of Brno.
Brno
We also went through Bratislava, which two wild and crazy guys made famous on Saturday Night Live (if I'm not mistaken). It seems to have Soviet style blocks of apartments.
Bratislava
Bratislava
This was a little station in Northern Hungary. I wanted to show the graffiti I kept seeing outside of Budpest. I'm not sure if there is gang activity there or not. It's too bad that so many attractive smaller buildings have been defaced that way.

We traveled from Budapest to Prague by train today. It was an enjoyable experience without any major difficulties. We previously bought our train tickets so that we wouldn't have to worry about it this morning. We were pleasantly surprised that the tickets only cost about $45 a piece for reserved 2nd class. The trip is 350 miles and took 7 hours, so this seemed like a reasonable price. I couldn't find anything comparable in air travel. Bus would have cost less (only $30 a piece), but wouldn't have been as comfortable. It would have taken us the same amount of time. We were delighted to have a cabin with 6 reclining seats all to ourselves. It was clean, comfortable, and had air conditioning. We were able to get to the train station in Budapest from our place in about 20 minutes door to station. We walked about 10 minutes, then took a bus the rest of the way. The whole process was easy. We we arrived in Prague, we found a cash machine, then looked for a tourist information booth. Unfortunately, there did not appear to be any booths with people to help us. Instead we found a store that sold tourist maps. The woman there told us exactly what we needed to know. The train depot was close enough to our apartment to walk, which we did. It felt good to move around after sitting on the train.

Our new apartment is beautiful! It's a renovated apartment in an Art Nouveau building across the street from "Dvorak's Church". It is also just a block away from the Vltava River. Here is the website with more photos: http://www.vrbo.com/283152. The first thing we did was head to the supermarket about half a mile away to lay in a few supplies. That was as well stocked as our QFC in Wallingford. Tonight we are charting what sightseeing we want to do tomorrow.