We started our bicycle trip to Prague in Vienna, which is where, among other things, Sigmund Freud revolutionized the human understanding of our minds' workings.

Here, Gary stands where it all happened, in the Freud examination room attached to his Vienna apartment.  Note that Gary's is striking the classic Freud pose, substituting for the famous cigar.

To paraphrase Freud, "Sometimes a cigar is just an oversized tape player."  

Rick at the Vienna "Plague Column" Along with Vienna, many Czech towns had monuments remembering the terrors of the Black Plague, which killed about half the population of Europe. In this monument, the vanquished Black Plague is portrayed as scary-looking woman. 

Medieval Europe's theocracies often used women, unflatteringly rendered, to portray "evil".  Apparently, among Roman Catholic Church pathologies, misogyny preceded forced celibacy.   

Where ever we go in Europe, the most wonderful people always turn out to be Dutch!  The best part of Vienna was meeting Arjan Kaashoek, who was in Vienna studying the architectural predecessor to Art Deco, Jugendstil.  As we bicycled through various remote villages in the Moravian section of The Czech Republic, the impact of the Jugendstil school kept reappearing.

Here we are bicycling across the Austrian-Czech international border. 

Thirteen years ago, this border was part of the Iron Curtin that separated Communist-controlled Eastern Europe from the Free World. 

Now, the very friendly border guards just asked for a quick glance at our passports.  

Behind us is a pretty typical Czech castle.  Many started more than 1000 years ago with a basic tower or fortress, such as the cylindrical stone tower on the right.  Then they were added onto and modernized century after century. These sorts of castles dot the Czech countryside.  

Although our bicycle group sometimes stopped at a restaurant for lunch, we very much preferred and enjoyed the wonderful picnics that our guides would set up for us at a nice park or a river along our bicycling route.

Gary is speaking to our Czech tour guides, Vašek (leaning forward) and Mikolaš  (leaning back).  Both young men are students from Brno who bicycle-tour guide during the summer, with Vašek working on his doctorate in economics and Mikolaš working on his master's degree in Political Science.  Chatting with each of them during the bike rides was one of the big treats of the trip for us.

At another castle along our bicycle route. We stopped to take a guided tour of this one and had an epiphany. We always found it curious that Americans go to great expense and inconvenience to build their home high up on hills or mountains.  This is always said to be done for the "view", even though most Americans have little interest in spectacular views that cannot be "owned". 

It occurred to us that the tradition of associating elevated homes with high status may have come from European nobility, despite the fact that nobles originally built their castles high up on hills not for the views but to protect themselves from pillaging nomads and attacking armies.  On the other hand, perhaps our American nobility wannabees -- cloistered in their hilltop McMansions -- simply seek protection from today's pillaging nomads and attacking armies: door-to-door high school fundraisers and Seventh Day Adventists.   

Gary at our apartment in Prague.  Although not on a hill, we had a wonderful view of a cafe across the street, as well as a view of "Staré Mĕsto," the 1,500-year-old medieval town square at the heart of Prague. It was less than a city block away. 

Gary needs to be cautious, however.  The word "defenestration" -- assassination by throwing the victim out a window -- originated in Prague. Indeed, in the first Prague Defenestration (1419 A.D.), an angry mob used windows to eject the entire Prague city council (ah, the good ole days!)   

Rick with V.I. Lenin, the father of Soviet Communism whose 80-year-old corpse is still preserved and displayed in Moscow. A very angry revolutionary who called for the massacre of capitalist pigs everywhere and whose pictures and statues used to be omnipresent in Prague, Lenin has now been sequestered to the Museum of Communism.

Located above a McDonald's in Prague, the Museum tells the chilling story of Russian Communism's reign of terror on Europe, particularly on the peoples of Czech Republic and of the Slovak Republic (then known as Czechoslovakia).

Although still popularly known in Russia as a benign leader whose intentions were corrupted by Stalin, recent scholarship has revealed Lenin to be comparable to Stalin (both former Seminary students) in blood thirst, paranoia, and inhumanity.  In fact, Lenin preceded Hitler in coining the phrase "concentration camp."  (August, 1918, in a telegram to the commissars of Penza. Anne Applebaum, Gulag, New York, 2003)

We arrived in Prague about 3 weeks after the famous floods that devastated so many towns along the Vltava River.  Although we encountered very few reminders of the flood, the water line is still evident on this back alley in Prague. 

On the bicycle trip to Prague, we once had to carry our bikes though a ditch because flood waters had cut the road in half. 

In return for a donation to help flood victims, we were allowed to write our names on one of the bricks to be used for rebuilding.  Here's Gary on Staré Mĕsto (Old Town) square as he points to our brick.

Rick at the park and old fortress that overlooks Prague. Directly above us is a Czech version of the Eiffel Tower, which Hitler disliked and ordered destroyed during the Nazi occupation of the former Czechoslovakia.  Somehow, Hitler's orders were successfully frustrated until the Nazi's retreat.