back in Prague

We've returned from our amazing trip with my parents (to whom I can't say thank you enough!!). Everything was wonderful.
I am working on uploading and writing captions for the pictures (I took over 700 while they were here). I have just finished loading and writing captions for the part of the trip while they were here in Prague and they're on the picassa site. Click here.

The pictures on this post:
Picture 1 -- mom and dad at the top of the tower on the Old Town side of the Charles Bridge, you can see the bridge behind them
Picture 2 -- Jason and Chelsey in the bone church
Picture 3 -- all of us looking fashionable in our spelunking gear

While they were in Prague, we visited the castle, Wallenstein Palace, Vysehrad, Petrin Hill, Old Town Square, crossed the Charles Bridge, to name a few of our adventures. We were busy. In fact, there were a couple days when mom's step counter said we'd gone 30,000 steps! (And the step counter didn't give mom double credit for all of the stairs, though she thought it should have. And we did A LOT of stairs. We climbed almost every tower in Prague.)

We took one day and went for a day-trip out to Kutna Hora. It is a small town now, but in its heyday in the 13th century it was the second largest city in Bohemia thanks to its silver mines. Our first stop in the town was at the bone church. This ossuary is decorated with the remains of 40,000 plague victims. Some of the decorations are quite elaborate and it's hard to imagine that they're entirely made of bone.
Next we climbed up the hill to see mom's church (St. Barbara's Church). Barbara was getting a facelift at the time, but the gothic structure was still beautiful.
Our next stop was a tour of the silver mines. We were able to climb down into an old mine and then walk though one of its passageways. We were outfitted in very stylish helmets and coats and supplied with heavy-duty flashlights. At first I thought this seemed like a bit much, but after we were down in the cave I was thankful to have them. The ceiling was quite low in many parts of the cave, and if I hadn't been wearing the helmet I would have emerged with quite a few bumps and bruises.
Our guide told us that the workers descended down into the mines using a series of slides and then had to climb back out using adjoining ladders. She said it took them 30 minutes to slide down and over two hours to climb back out. Also, at one point she had us turn off all of our flashlights and demonstrated the light the miners had to work with -- it was nearly pitch black! She said they relied heavily on the sense of smell. I can't imagine being able to work down there like that.

I hope to have all of the Turkey/Greece pictures posted in the next few days and Jason and I are writing the blog entries to go with them.