It was always our intention during our winter stay in Prague 2011/2012 to take several side trips to surrounding cities in the Czech Republic as well as surrounding countries. We have done some of that but not as much as we had envisioned. Prague itself is just too addictive, I guess.
So look up to the menu line in the header. See the new page titled ENVIRONS and click on it after you read the travel advisory below.
One thing we learned during this last train trip is that it does not pay to walk up to the ticket window and just tell them you want a ticket to your destination. It turns out that doing that cost us twice the amount we paid on the return journey by buying three separate tickets. It seems that part of our itinerary was along the route that Czech Trains competes with Student Agency Trains so they had a special rate for that portion that we didn’t get by buying the one ticket. The sad part is that we only discovered this when the train depot in Klodzko, Poland would not sell us a ticket to Prague but only to the border. This was very disconcerting at the time but the kind English speakers at our hotel found out that we could just get on the train and by the next ticket from the conductor. We were worried about being stranded somewhere but it all worked out quite easy as well as cheaper.
By the way we saw one of the Student Agency trains and decided to try them for our next journey in the limited directions that they go. We have read that they are quite good and thus forcing the national railway to improve. The guy in the photo is Radim JanÄura, owner of Student Agency. I bet he gets a kick out of having his own train set.