Inspired by this month's Challenge #2 - Heritage. The photos on this page were taken in 2010. The journaling on the left refers to the massive volcanic eruption in Iceland which paralyzed European air traffic and grounded thousands of planes around the world for a couple of weeks.
Read about me scrapping this page here.
The journaling on the left reads:
When the kids were small and enjoyed going on trips with us, we'd take them somewhere every weekend. We'd go to the zoo or to a museum but more often than not we'd visit one of the hundreds of medieval castles that lie within a couple of hours' drive from Prague. 500-year old ruins made excellent playgrounds, all we needed was one where no guided tour was offered. This photo was taken at Zvikov Castle - one of those places that we wouldn't remember the name of had it not been for Google Photos lens feature.
What we do remember, however, was that on the way back to the car I got a phone call from my parents who'd just been told that their flight from Malta - along with hundreds other European flights - had been canceled until further notice, and we spent the next few days monitoring news and devising plans how to get them home. Shall they take a ferry to Rome and Josef would drive there - 1,470 km - to pick them up? In the end, we didn't need to do anything, flights resumed and they got home safely... But my mother would learn to pronounce the name of the volcano as if she were fluent in Icelandic and entertain all us for years to come...
The journaling on the right reads:
It was a cold and miserable day - drizzly and windy. Hard to say, why we'd decided it was the perfect day to to go all the way to U-n-L with two small kids, but we had, perhaps because being a private castle, it was one of the few that stayed open all year round. There was hardly anyone else there. We roamed the empty rooms, kids enjoying themselves despite the weather, and at some point I found myself standing in a vast hall in front of a long-dead fireplace with a plaque which read that during the 13th century this was the only heated room in the castle. The ONLY heated room???? This is CZ [Czech Republic], not Singapore! It snows here! All these years later, I am still in shock.
There were definitely no selfies back then. We didn't always care which castle we visited, the only requirement was a 'no mandatory guided tour'. Kids loved roaming the ruins.
Smaller castles offered interactive expositions which were fun to explore in a hands-on way.
