Karlovy Vary - The Great Adventure

Today let me regale you with a story—a tale of bravery, adventure, and true heroics. 

The setting: the picturesque mountain town of Karlovy Vary, the sun is out and it looks to be a perfect day.  Alex, Kati, and myself had stopped in a back-street cellar restaurant for an authentic Czech lunch, svíčová na smetaně (roast beef with sour cream sauce and cranberries), which was quite delicious.

Then we stepped outside and all hell broke loose.  The sky was falling—literally.  The sun was nowhere to be found and raindrops the size of my fingers were pounding against the cobblestoned street.  We had left our raincoats at the hotel, well on the other side of the town.  Our only hope was to wait out the storm.  Yet we dashed from the entrance to the restaurant to the great gates of a church and then rushed down the hill to the building housing the Vřídlo geyser, splashing through the street-turned river with every step.  After sampling the sulfurous healing waters Vřídlo had to offer, we were faced with a dilemma.  We wanted to continue exploring the city, but Alex was wearing his only pair of jeans for the week and Kati, being a girl, was scared she would melt in the rain.

It was at that moment that I thought to myself, “Jackson, this is one of those moments that define your character; one of those moments that separates the men from the boys.”  In an instant I sacrificed my dryness and dashed out into the rain, up the street—trying to make it to the hotel and retrieve raincoats for all of us.  After crowning the top of a large hill I realized that I should not have gone uphill, but by then it was too late, I was trapped and could either backtrack or go even further and hope for a way down.  I decided to do a little freestyle running and jumped off a few ledges into the backyards of hotels and down back alleys until I finally reached the Hotel Romania.  Walking through the patio restaurant and into the lobby, I got a number of sideways glances.  There was no possible way I belonged in that hotel when I was drenched head-to-toe in a ratty t-shirt and couldn’t even see where I was going through the precipitation on my glasses.

Yet I put on my sandals, grabbed our coats, and made my way triumphantly back down the street to meet Alex and Kati.  Not more than 20 steps away from the hotel, the rain stopped.