Yet Another Holiday?

In my blog “Another Holiday” I tell the tales of a vacation which required some creativity as my husband and I met my sister and her family in Europe to travel together. The day we arrived was a Saturday, however, we realized when we checked into our hotel, too late to do anything about it, that it was a holiday and everything was closed. Everything. No restaurants. No grocery stores. No shopping. Nothing. We made things work that first night as my sister saved the day with convenient store sandwiches and chips from the only store still open as her family came through the airport. We had a hotel picnic and some good laughs as we got caught up.

After a week of fun and family time, our vacations diverged. My sister and her family went to a different city in Austria, and my husband and I went on to Munich, Germany. We took a bus across the Bavarian countryside, checked in, grabbed dinner, and prepared our plans for the following day. As we awoke ready to do some shopping, we discovered it was… you guessed it… another holiday. No shopping for us because the following day we would leave. None of this ruined our vacation, it just caused us to be creative in how we spent it. We found a single castle and grounds that were open for viewing, and luckily we packed snacks that we travel with for just such an occasion.

Recently, we traveled again, just the two of us, to the Czech Republic. I have never seen so many malls in one place before. It felt like every time we turned the corner, there was another mall. Not exactly like the ones in the US, but almost “secret” stashes of stores that seemed to be only a storefront on the outside, but upon closer inspection, actually consisted of many, many stores that went back into the hidden recesses of the buildings. As I was looking at the weather and surveying the area where we were staying, I noticed that the day smack dab in the middle of our trip was… wait for it… a holiday. Labor Day to be exact, which happens to be May 1st. Because of our previous experience with European holidays, on April 30th, we stocked up on food that we could ration the following day figuring everything would be closed.

Boy were we wrong! I’ve never seen a city so crowded with people in my life! 98% of the shops, grocery stores, restaurants, attractions, museums, transportation options, and more were fully operational. Our past scars had left us with adhesions that marked any future trip with potential pain, only to realize, not every European country operates in the same way.

Then we ran into the marathon. Oh everything was open, but with 16,000 runners and their families and friends, on top of what was already an overcrowded city of tourists from around the world, descending on the very neighborhood in which we were staying, it might as well have been a holiday. We intentionally stayed within walking distance to everything we wanted to see; old town square, the Charles Bridge, the city center, however, these areas were exactly where the marathon was running. We were basically sequestered to our hotel room unless we were willing to be pushed and shoved along the sidewalks and streets watching marathoners as if we were cheering on our loved one, going where the mobs wanted to go. 

Again, our vacation did not suffer because we ran into the marathon AND a holiday, we just changed what we thought our days might look like. With a bit of creativity and having learned to hold our plans loosely, we leaned into the unexpected and changed the adventure. 

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