Germany -> Prague
First, Flo and I couldn't find our Car2Go. We looked up and down the street and finally found the car a street over. Then everything was going well, we were doing about 130kph (~80mph) and all the sudden Flo couldn't accelerate and we couldn't go faster than 80kph (~ 49mph). Cars and trucks were flying by! This was around 10:15 am Friday. We pulled off the autobahn and waited a while for ADAC, the German kind of AAA, and that guy couldn't help us (12:30), so we had to drive to the Smart dealership so they could either fix or replace our rental car. Finally around 2pm we were on our way again. The trip was pretty uneventful until we got to the city of Prague. The Google directions wanted us to go down the wrong way down one way streets. Somehow we ended up in the underground parking lot of a mall once and couldn't figure out how to get over the river to the hotel. We finally got to our hotel about an hour later (about 6pm. we were supposed to be there at 1).
Prague
We got to our hotel, Hotel Manes, finally. We parked on the street checked into the hotel. Our conversation went kind of like this:
hotel: Hello, welcome...
me: hi, blah blah... Where can we park our car?
hotel: anywhere on the street. It's the weekend, so it's free.
me: ok, I am already parked there. So it's ok to park there? we're not going to get ticketed or towed? It's safe there?
hotel: yes, we can see it. It's no problem.
So we checked in and went up to our room. The hotel was really elegant and the staff was really friendly and helpful, but when we got to our room, it sounded like someone taking a shower or someone pouring water into a bucket above us. I asked the reception and they said it would go away, just wait it out. So we went and took a walk and got lost for another hour in Prague walking around. My favorite part was when Flo said as we were turning the corner "so we finally made it back" and we realized we were actually in the city center old city area and just walked in a GIANT circle. haha! Now I think it's hilarous, but at the time it was about midnight and it wasn't so funny then. We were back in the room, and the water noise was a lot louder, not really quieter. Luckily, the hotel moved us to a smaller, but much quieter room and that was it for the night.
The next morning Flo and I were eating a delicious breakfast and he wanted to do something with the car and I was waiting for the breakfast lady to put out a fresh plate of fruit. She came out and I loaded my plate, then Flo came over and told me the car was gone. It turns out that the city of Prague cleans the streets once a month and it was just our luck that the one day they clean the streets was the day we were there and they towed our car.
The hotel management apologized, and said they didn't see the sign and that we could check out late and help ourselves to the minibar. So we cleaned it out.
that was it for the bad luck. Somehow Flo and I always have fun and even with all that bad luck we had a blast in Prague. Next time we should stay for more than one night :)
I think the theme of this summer's trips is something will go wrong. But this way we have a good story and the big debacle of Flo's camera resulted in a midnight tour of a castle! Fun fun!
