Cycling in Czech Republic: Litomerice to Decin

I start the day with a quick look around Litoměřice. I return to the main square where I had dinner the previous night. Here the main feature is the town hall which has a chalice shaped watch tower on the roof, apparently used for meetings by local leaders. From the top — which just had to be climbed — there was a three hundred and sixty degree view of the whole area.

Litom??ice Panorama

(If you’re getting bored of my attempts at panoramas you’ll be please to see that this is the last of this trip.)

The town has quite a history — it’s one of the oldest in the Czech Republic — but I don’t loiter as this is the second longest day of cycling, with 48km to go before my next hotel.

Litom??ice

Fortunately it doesn’t feel like the longest day. There are a couple of reasonably steep inclines, but these are offset by long, very flat sections and enormously fun down-hill free-wheels. Even the steep parts would have been a lot easier had my chain not kept falling off.

Cycling from Litomerice to D??ín

One unfortunate thing about long cycling days is there are not a lot of photo-taking opportunities, so you’ll have to take my word for it when I saw that the scenery was fantastic.

Děčín itself — my night stop — is not the prettiest town that I’ve stopped in so far, but there’s a nice bar right next to the river which makes an ideal spot to write postcards and watch the sun set.

Tomorrow I will cross over the Czech border into Germany, a fact reflected in the menus provided at dinner later. Despite taking German at school I have very little idea what I am likely to be served, something I again seem to share with the waiters.

This is the fourth of a series of posts about my cycling holiday from Prague in the Czech Republic, to Meißen, in Germany. See the index page for more details or subscribe to my RSS feed for updates as they arrive.