Roadtrip 2022: Czechia Self Before You Rakija Self

Matt2000

An Unfortunate Discovery
DONOR
Joined
Feb 17, 2006
Messages
18,135
Location
Four from the top and two from the third row, UK.
Car(s)
'12 MX-5 PRHT, '02 Freelander, '90 Disco 1 Bobtail
I wasn't on the trip but I can serve to get this going with a brief summary from photos posted on Telegram. They were forewarned.

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Can confirm, wine was actually good and (along with other things) made the evening on top of Stelvio quite enjoyable.

It may also have or have not contributed to events that happened to me on the following morning, which directly lead into the last picture. The food in Switzerland's smallest hospital was quite good as well.

Will post more pictures and some more info on both the trip and my slightly different ending of it soon™.
 
I'll play along.


Ready to go, still plenty of spare luggage capacity!
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Empty French roads were amazing after a few annoying hours on the A5 :shakefist:
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French hotel parking lot... paging @ninjacoco
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:wub:
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A while into the trip the BMW nav started going bonkers... "turn left" - :no:
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Interesting breakfast room decor outside Turin... obviously a Fiat plant wasn't far.
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:wub:
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Swiss hotel shower view :jawdrop:
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Same car, different body? :nod:
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Ran into some internet weirdos atop Stelvio :dunno:







Best Noise Award? :nod:


Reprogramming the ECU 🤓
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This trailer got picked out by the popo, note the dangling blue strap they were dragging behind the trailer about 5m long on the Autobahn... (again paging @ninjacoco for the street signs)
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Quoted from the post above:
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A few days earlier, at the same spot (just looking into the other direction):
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Sadly my summer holidays were truly fixed this year and so I had to do a solo roadtrip during July instead of hooning together with the FG horde later on. Mind you blasting the V10 over just about any pass road between Switzerland and the French Riviera for almost two weeks was truly awesome, but still, would have been great if I could have participated at the official trip. - Oh well, there is always next year...

Keep the reports and pictures and videos coming!
 
Alright, let's kick this off then. In the usual chronological manner, here goes:

Day 0 - Friday, August 5th

I set off in the morning from home with the plan to charge underway, pick up @ninjacoco at Nürnberg airport, then meet up with @Adrian soon after and continue to the overnight stay in Pilsen via highway.

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Not many pictures from the first half of the day. The first Supercharger I hit was Erlangen, been there many times on the way to and from Munich, no pictures taken. At NUE I was a bit confused with parking and didn't have time to make any pictures until Stef showed up and we set off going again.

Then, just past Nürnberg, we pulled over at a parking lot and waited for several minutes, and a wild @Adrian arrived.

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I was and still am amazed that he actually pulled this through, bringing the Donkervoort all the way over from Norway and going on the trip with it. It's completely and utterly insane. And so we spent a little time ogling it, getting in the way of the locals trying to use the parking lot for... something, and generally standing around and doing nothing, as is tradition.

Eventually, it was time to continue.





Following the Donk down German and then Czech highways, we soon reached Pilsen. Did a brief stop after crossing the border since the local signs reminded us of the existence and necessity of vignettes. Briefly discussed avoiding them by going on B-roads, but they were cheap and available digitally with no annoying stickers, so a couple € later we continued properly legal.

In Pilsen, we met up with most of the rest of the group at our first overnight stop, a neat rental apartment complex with a large-ish enclosed yard on the north-western outskirts of the city.

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The cars did attract some interest from the locals. Some construction worker-looking types from the biggest Sprinter van I've ever seen piled around the Donk, perking up especially once we took off the hood, and nodded approvingly when Adrian started it up and revved a couple times. None of them spoke any language we did, but it wasn't really necessary.

I had one of the somewhat rare, but regularly occuring encounters with a local Arteon driver and his wife, who spoke Russian. The dude was very interested in the Donk, but when I went to get something out of the 3, suddenly started going off on me about how EVs will ruin driving for everyone, make electricity expensive, and how "he is a free person with 1200 km range with his diesel and I am limited". I politely nodded and eventually stopped paying attention.

For dinner, we obviously headed into Pilsen itself to have some beers and food. It was good.

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By the time we got back, everyone had arrived, including some Finns and Swedes, and the apartment yard consisted almost exclusively of our vehicles until next morning. I must say, this time around the selection was exquisite. We discussed it a little more over some more beers served right there by our landlord from a little bar.

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To be continued.
 
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Day 1 - Saturday, August 6th

We gathered up in the morning and set off to the south-east, towards Austria. The day's route was reasonably long, but we were in good spirits.

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On the previous evening, I might have accidentally said "hey, we have no shitboxes around on this trip". Technically true, but I should've kept my mouth shut I guess. Not even a half hour into the drive, the Saab crew called for a stop with coolant issues:

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Not seeing a major problem straight away, the system was refilled and we continued - not for very long:

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I also had to call a stop during the first half of the day. Funnily enough, my issue also had to do with cooling, although of a different variety.

Before the trip started, @Adrian contacted me asking if I was OK with bringing a cooler box on the trip in the Tesla. Sure, I said. The car is mostly empty, how big can this thing be.

Well.

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This absolute unit of a fridge essentially took up the entire rear seat. It would not fit in the trunk (too tall), not in the footwell - the seat was the only place for it to go. And it took us several attempts to figure out a system where all the seatbelts around it were buckled in, and it was secured from moving in any direction despite Roadtrip driving. Early in the day, we hadn't figured all of that out, and in left turns it would trigger the rear seatbelt alarm - annoying as all hell, hence the call for a stop.

Apart from these incidents, the day was largely uneventful. We cleared a lot of fun roads, enjoyed much humor at all the "Horní" village names, and did Roadtrip things. I didn't have a Gopro running in the car yet, and didn't take many pictures due to being occupied driving.

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A thing of some note was a late afternoon lunch stop in Freistadt, Austria. I charged the car, and we all enjoyed some food in the old city center - although it was not as easy to locate as we would have liked.

After Freistadt, some more fun driving was had, this time on Austrian roads. Some of those roads were a bit wet, and the Mustang ahead of me had a bit of a moment apparently:



At the end of the day, we arrived at the overnight stop in Pöchlarn. We were given more or less the whole rear house of the hotel for our use, including the driveway to park all the vehicles.

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To be continued.
 
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After Freistadt, some more fun driving was had, this time on Austrian roads. Some of those roads were a bit wet, and the Mustang ahead of me had a bit of a moment apparently:

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It looks a lot less dramatic in the clip than it felt in the car. Definitely a "some poo came out!" moment. :LOL:

I'm also too lazy to sort through my pile of photos and post them here, so I'll just drop a link to my GPhotos album here.
 
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I've been meaning to ask this but keep forgetting, can someone explain to a mostly uneducated Brit what on Earth is happening on this plate please? :p

I looked up some local Pilsen dishes, they mentioned beer cake and it kind of looked like this. I see what looks like cake and ice cream, but also that looks like beef and maybe soup. Happy to be pointed to the website of the place you ate at.
 
Right I get it, seems to be svíčková - beef with a vegetable gravy, cream, cranberry sauce and dumplings. The sauce looked like cake to me. Makes much more sense now and much easier when there's something to search for. I'd eat the crap out of that. 😀

I love the CD player in the accommodation too, a real icon of the late 90s and early 00s.
 
Oooh, what's the story with the yellow MR2? And what happened with the Saab's coolant? I hope it wasn't the water pump or turbo line.
 
It looks a lot less dramatic in the clip than it felt in the car. Definitely a "some poo came out!" moment. :LOL:

I'm also too lazy to sort through my pile of photos and post them here, so I'll just drop a link to my GPhotos album here.
omg that absolute legend in the Subaru :ROFLMAO:

...and Wine Night. Hahahahahaha.
 
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Still gnawing through it, but most of mine so far are up here, as usual: https://www.instagram.com/stefthepef/

Will hopefully remember to add to the Google Album as soon as I have a spare moment. Hopefully. Either that or I'll remain terrible at posting photos.
 
hijacking the thread for my private little moan: it's insane to me how I'm perfectly fine to view the embedded grams here, but when I try to look at shit on the actual site, zuck wants me to log in. no account? fook yue! :bangin:
 
hijacking the thread for my private little moan: it's insane to me how I'm perfectly fine to view the embedded grams here, but when I try to look at shit on the actual site, zuck wants me to log in. no account? fook yue! :bangin:
Instagram's gotten stupid about this recently. I'll have to add my pics to the main Google gallery when I'm done with this feature and that rebuild and that other feature and oh my gosh what did I come home to
 
Okay, time for my photos! I finally found some time to organize everything today. It's a mix of camera photos (all taken in raw and edited) and phone photos (which I just converted from that bullshit *.HEIC standard to *.jpg, and that's it), you can tell them apart by the aspect ratio: 4:3 are phone pics, 3:2 camera pics. I didn't take nearly as much photos as last year, but I still took some highlights. And nope, I'm still not exactly comfortable with photos of people, so that's why there won't be much people in my photos. :D

Okay, starting with Day 0. I took an overnight bus from Zagreb to Plzeň, with a 5-hour stop in Prague. Despite that day being hot as hell (36 °C IIRC), and sunlight being strong, I went on a sightseeing tour of Prague with my camera:

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Yeah, I had to live up to my forum nickname and take a picture or two (or three) of trams in Prague. Also, this time I got to ride in them! :D

Anyway, we stayed in Plzeň that night, while I have no pics of Plzeň, rest assured it was a nice town with slightly confusing traffic and decent cuisine. I do have a pic of @Adrian's Donkervoort in the morning of Day 1 taken in front of the hotel/boarding house/whatever:

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The whole day 1 seemed pretty uneventful and easy-paced to me, apart from a certain Saab breaking down and a very short 'moment' in a Mustang, that nevertheless woke me up from light sleep. :D

On day 2 I decided to take a ride in @Brotan's MR2, which led to a visit to what looked like a slightly run-down US car salesroom. Interesting place to take pictures, that's for sure:

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Have some cows from that day as well, as well as a group of people standing around doing nothing:

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The MR2 decided to blend in with other colorful Japanese roadsters:

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The rest of day 2 went pretty smoothly, with the Saab leaving for Maribor before the others, taking a faster route, and arriving there before the others. That means we ended up in Maribor in the evening, where we had loads of meat, especially for non-Balkan standards. Others were pretty full after that night!

Day 3 meant going from Maribor to Villach through B-roads in northern Slovenia. That was interesting, because some of the roads were not paved. Of course, the selection of cars, as evident from some pictures above, wasn't exactly ideal for those roads. Nevertheless, we stopped at Solčava, a place in Slovenia near the Austrian border, for lunch that day. I still remember the looks on other people's faces when I ordered fried calamari with french fries. It's a normal thing to order in this part of the world!

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And then we reached Austria:

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And after some time, reached Villach, where we stayed for the night:
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On day 4 we woke up in the morning only to find out that @Adrian's Donkervoort left a black spot underneath. Dismantling the front panels, it turned out it was leaking coolant, but what was only drops in the morning turned to a constant stream of coolant by noon. That meant taking the front panels off again and MacGyvering the problem in front of a DIY store:

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After a couple of hours of fiddling with it, the car was finally ready to go. I went with @MXM this time, in a Clio he rented. I do have to admit, the Clio wasn't as fun as I assume some other cars would've been in the Italian Alps, but it got us through twisty Italian B-roads to Belluno, Italy, in the end, which is all that matters. We ended up in industrial part of the city, which surprised us with a pretty fine restaurant where we had some excellent pizza. No pictures of that from me, but I'm sure other have them. :D

That leads me to day 5, the day when we headed to Stelvio. On the way there, we took a look at some dams:

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And then we stopped at some scenic view which I honestly can't remember much of, other than that I had to take pictures of:

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Anyway, the next pictures I have are the top of the Stelvio pass:

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An obligatory group shot:

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And that's it for the Roadtrip from me. I'll post the Ringmeet shots as soon as the photo thread for that is open. Or I might as well open it myself. :D
 
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