Novosedly - Lipno - Cesky Krumlov - Novosedly

Lipno mountain biking - warm!

Firecracker day!!  

First stop Lipno for me to go on a mountain bike ride and the kids and Nicki to go on the luge run as it's open all year.  Or so we thought.  Parked the car and walked up to the ticket office to see the shutters down and some sign in Czech with the dates 26/11, 27/11, 28/11, 29/11 on the sign.  Obviously it's closed for those 4 days.  The only 4 days we are in the Czech Republic.  

What are the bloody odds?

Wheeeeee! - Not blurred but fog.

The kids were good about it though and Nicki drove me to the top of the hill for a downhill mountain bike run.  It was great fun going on a dedicated course with jumps, berms and obstacles.  Got to the bottom in no time and Nicki shuttled me up two more times.

We had some lunch from the supermarket again and then boarded the firecracker express to a small town near the border to stock up.

The kids (and me to be honest) were like the proverbial in a lolly shop with a $50 bill.  The Asian shop bloke spotted us and walked over and said in broken English 'you want boom boom?'  

'Yes Sir, yes we do'.

After a bit of haggling with the bloke we managed to buy 20 bungers, a dozen bottle rockets, 400 poh-hahs (mini bungers), a dozen tubes that shot balls out of the top and some mad square thing that weighed about a kilo and consisted of 16 carboard rolls set in a square formation.  No idea what that one did but it was big so it met my stringent specifications.  All up €28 worth.

There were heaps of others too and some that looked downright dangerous.  I like a big explosion as much as the next bloke but some of these things would have taken your hand off if it all went wrong so we gave the larger ones a miss.

Crackers!!!!

Jumped back in the car with a dozen boxes of matches and drove straight out of town to find an empty paddock.  Set a few of the smaller ones off and had a great laugh.   (Those with a penis found it far more hilarious than those without.)  Then I took out one of the small bungers we had which was about 40mm high by 15mm diameter.  I wasn't too sure how much of a bang that'd make so I gave it a fair hoick.  

Holy smokes!  

Lucky we didn't buy the bigger ones otherwise the Czech SAS may have descended on the area to see what sort of terrorist training we were undergoing out in the forest.

Went home after stopping another time to let off a couple of rockets and checked with our host to see if there was somewhere we could let off a few others.  More explosions and hilarity before we had to get ready for dinner.

We boarded the firecracker express and drove into Cesky Krumlov where we caught up with my Czech-mate (see what I did there) that I'd met mountain biking in Italy for dinner with his wife and 2 children.  A top bloke and an unassuming adventurous type who not only mountain bikes but rock climbs and camps in minus 30 degree weather by himself in the mountains.  His wife is a doctor which you'll hope he'll not need but is quite handy given some of the activities he gets up to.