We are motorcycle racing fans. We’ve enjoyed the MotoGP events at Laguna Seca (California, USA) for the past few years. Obviously, we would not be going to California for the races this year, and our trip to Qatar for the opening race of the season was such fun that we HAD to go to another GP! We chose Brno in the Czech Republic.
Why Brno? Many reasons…we’d been to Brno before (2001), it is a nice city, easy to get around, relatively inexpensive. Also the agent that we’d booked Qatar through, Pole Position Travel, is based in Prague, so this is one of their Premier events. Lastly, Brno is relatively easy to get to from Cairo, so… why not??
We flew to Vienna on Wednesday, August 15th. As per usual, we’d booked transportation to and from the airport with our usual travel service (see “Best Laid Plans” post). Our car was on time, got us to the airport and left us at THE WRONG TERMINAL. It took a few minutes of rushing around the terminal and asking questions to discover that flights to Austria do not fly from the international terminal. Doesn’t THAT make perfect sense? Our driver was already gone so we attempted to take the airport shuttle to the other terminal to no avail. We eventually flagged a taxi to get us to the terminal.
When we arrived at the check-in counter, the *nice*man* tried to tell Jack that we were too late to check in for the flight. Needless to say, that did not go over well with Jack. I was concerned that someone (read: the *nice*man*) was about to die. We did, eventually, get checked in and boarded the plane. AHHHHH – it’ll all be easy from here, right?
We had the child from HELL sitting behind us for the flight. About 7 years old and spoiled to the extreme. Her 4 year old sister was a perfect little traveler, but the 7YO was horrid!
Once in Vienna, things went much more smoothly. We got to our hotel without hassle, our room got upgraded to one with a bathroom and we had only to get dinner and sleep before we headed to Brno for the track.
The track was not open to spectators until Friday. We arrived in Brno on Thursday afternoon after a lovely, albeit steamy, train ride from Vienna. While still in Vienna, we’d been informed by Pole Position of a problem with our hotel reso for Thursday, but they had worked out a contingency plan, so we didn’t worry. At our “temporary” hotel, we found that we were two of a relatively large group people with problem resos for Thursday, we dubbed ourselves the “Gregor Refugees” for the remainder of the weekend.
Pole Position had put all the “refugees” up in rooms in a downtown hotel, and arranged transportation to the “Pre-party” at the Starobrno brewery, with dinner and beer on the company! They also arranged to move our luggage to our other hotel, and transport us to and from the track! SWEET!!
We had some time to kill before dinner at the brewery, I amazed Jack by guiding us on a short walk to the EXACT location where we stayed in 2001. It was only a few blocks away, as I’d realized when I looked at the map. We had a nice time unwinding, re-seeing some of the sights of downtown Brno, before we headed back for the brewery and dinner.
“Giants” Downtown
The Brewery – [Geek moment] This is RIGHT NEXT DOOR to the monastery where Gregor Mendel did his work!!
A good time was had by all. Brno is a great town. Now for the track!!!