Romantic Danube: Flying United from Chicago to Brussels
Romantic Danube: Brussels and continuing to Prague
Romantic Danube: Marriott Courtyard Prague
Romantic Danube: Exploring Prague
Romantic Danube: Boscolo, Autograph Collection
Romantic Danube: Prague to Erlangen
Since C and I weren't on Viking's official pre-trip tour, they wouldn't help us get from Prague to Nuremberg. Seems a little silly to me that they won't sell us a bus ticket if we're just going to meet up with them once we arrive. But that's their policy.
Oftentimes when transiting Europe it's very easy and convenient just to take a train between cities but in this case there are no direct connections between these two cities via rail so we purchased Deutsche Bahn tickets (which I think of as a rail company) on their bus.
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| South entrance of the Prague Train Station, which faces the Boscolo (Photo credit: CC BY 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=718104) |
Praha Hlavni Nadrazi
As I mentioned in the last post, the main train station was practically across the street from the Boscolo. It was more like the hotel was catty-corner from a small park and just beyond the park was the train station.
After returning from dinner on the evening prior to our departure, I suggested we go scope out the train station so that we'd know where we needed to be. Since our bus was scheduled to leave at 7:25 AM I didn't want to be dragging our luggage around, getting all sweaty while trying to find the proper platform. I was SO, SO glad we did this.
We arrived at the station and began looking around for the bus platforms. We saw signs for some buses but they weren't the ones we needed so we got in line at the information booth.
In general we felt very welcomed by the people of Prague. Very friendly, very helpful and English is widely spoken. (The fact that we were spending money helped, no doubt. The Czech koruna is very weak vs. the US dollar, making things seem very cheap to us.) But the young man working the information booth could not have been much less helpful if he'd tried. At first he told us there were no longhaul buses leaving from that station. We tried to tell him our tickets indicated that, in fact, they did but since we didn't have our tickets with us we couldn't prove him wrong. The nice thing about being so close to the station was that we were able to go back to the room, grab our tickets and return to the booth. After looking at the tickets he agreed the bus must leave from that station but had no idea where we could catch it. He sent us downstairs to the ticket office.
The young woman working at the ticket office told us to go up two floors to a place we'd already been before. We'd seen a door with both airplane and bus symbols on them and took that to mean this was where the airport buses departed. So we kept on looking and went up one more floor and found a number of bus stops but none of them appeared to be correct so we took a photo to show her to see if we were at the correct place. She was put out we had not followed her instructions and that we were supposed to go through the door with the airplane and bus symbols to find our stop. We re-visited that area and after checking a few different bus stops finally found the correct one. I can't even imagine the panic we'd have been feeling if we'd waited until the morning to try to figure this out!
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| The upstairs platform from which our bus actually departed (By Mohylek – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1381310) |
Deutsche Bahn to Nuremberg Hauptbahnhof
Our bus was a double-decker motor coach. First class consisted of a few seats on the lower level. There was a table between two of the rows. There was only one person riding there. As it was raining for much of our journey, the area seemed dark and gloomy. The tiny restroom was very clean and quite efficiently put together. No wasted space there!
Upstairs the bus was not even half-full so we each got our own set of two seats, which was nice. Wi-fi was provided once we reached Germany and we knew when we'd done that as the German police boarded and examined everyone's passports. I assume this is because we moved from a non-Schengen country to one in the Schengen zone.
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| Hauptbahnhof Nürnberg (Photo credit: By Jordan Zehner – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=37011267) |
We arrived at the train station in Nuremberg right on time and were left just a few steps away from the entrance. Though it was surely not the best place to exchange my money if I wanted the best value, it was certainly convenient to be able to change the few korunas I had into Euros.
Nuremberg to Erlangen
Our boat was actually docked in a little town called Erlangen, which is just outside of Nuremberg. To get there we had to catch a train. Most of our credit cards now have chips in them but are chip+signature cards, which means they don't work in the automated machines in Europe, which require chip+PIN cards. But we were able to go to the ticket counter and purchase what we needed.
While I have to think an elevator was available somewhere, we didn't see one in the immediate vicinity, so we hauled our suitcases up a long flight of stairs to get to our train's platform.
It was a relatively quick 15-20 minute ride to get to Erlangen, about 8 stops down the line.
After making the mistake of following the Taxi signs at the Erlangen station, we eventually made our way to the front of the building where the taxis actually were. We showed the driver the address and he looked puzzled for a moment then said something like "ah, Viking" which was a relief.
Once we arrived at our destination I could see why he was a bit confused. The area was quite industrial and seemed to have a bit of construction going on. But as we wound our way toward the river we soon saw the Viking flags that announced we were in the right place!
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| Our home for the next week! |
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