Roman holiday and Prague crackdown

After a 3:30 a.m. wakeup call we're off to the airport for our 5 a.m. flight to Athens for a brief stopover and then on to Rome. We arrive and get settled into our hotel by noon. the group has a quick pizza lunch and the final leg begins. We have until 9 p.m.Thursday to get to Prague for the final check in. Rome is, of course, on holiday and most tourist sites and businesses are not open on May 1. We have only a couple of hours to get into the Colliseum and the Forum before they close for 2 days. A few other sites, such as the Trevi Fountain and Spanish Steps remain accessible, of course. We also need to figure out how we will get ourselves to Prague. This year we have fewer route options as there are mandatory scavenges in Rome, Vienna, Ljubljana (Slovenia) and Prague, with optional ones in Bologna, Venice, Trieste, Salzburg and Linz. Having been in all the Austrian destinations only 2 years previously with GSH, we really don't want to repeat those same scavenges. We had hoped to see Venice on the way north but discover that no trains seats are available until late in the evening or the next day. After much waiting in queues and running back and forth between various ticket agents (who universally did their best to be as unhelpful as possible in finding alternate routings) we finally decide to just head to Prague and see as much of it as we can. We are sorely tempted to just fly there, since that will cost about 1/3 of the train fare. Instead, we board a train that will take us to Vienna and arrive there in the middle of the night having shared a small compartment sitting kneecap to kneecap with 4 large Austrians. Two of them disembark in Bologna, but the remaining couple seem to take up the same amount of space. In Vienna, we catch another train to Brno in the Czech Republic. We arrive very early in the morning and check into our hotel for a shower and a nap. Brno is a very pleasant surprise. It has a beautiful square (actually more of a triangle) in the middle of the "old town". We climb to the top of St. Peter & Paul Cathedral and have a visit with the mummies in the crypt. The old town hall that we're supposed to visit is closed for renovations. We knock off a mandatory and have Nutella and banana crepes for lunch, teeth achingly sweet but good. Early afternoon we board another train, this time to Olomouc, and this one is an even slower train than the previous two. We arrive a little after 5 p.m. and catch a tram to the old square. We find the tourist information office and discover that one of the scavenge locations is about to close. We hop into a taxi and rush off to the immense Gothic St. Wenceslas Cathedral just before its massive door closes at 6 p.m. Back to the square to locate the Trinity Column which is a baroque 35 m column with a tiny chapel in it, built in 1754. We also locate the Astronomical Clock (an ugly Stalinist revision of the original machine) and discover that the legendary founder of the city was Caesar. The next Prague train will get us in at midnight, so we decide to get a hotel here and head for Prague first thing in the morning. We find a great hotel right off the main square and get ourselves settled for our first real sleep in 36 hours. We find an outdoor cafe and have a leisurely dinner (first one in days). We order a mandatory `smazeny syr`` for a starter only to discover that it`s a large slab of fried cheese: tastes great, but the coronary arteries are not impressed. As with the majority of our GSH food challenges, we have the requisite bite and leave the rest. An early night is needed and we`re in bed by 9 p.m. The next morning we`re up early (too early for the included hotel breakfast) and catch the 6 a.m. train to Prague. We arrive at 9:30, dump our luggage at our hotel and are off and running again in 15 minutes. As with all European cities, all things evolve from the main square and so we start there. Beautifully preserved classic buildings surround us. We find another astronomical clock, circa 1410, find where Franz Kafka used to hang out and visit the Havelska Market. From there we make our way to the Charles Bridge and find it jam packed with tourists. We slowly make our way across the bridge while counting the 29 statures that line its sides, and fight our way to St. Vitus Cathedral. The church sits high atop a hill and the view of Prague from here is amazing. We visit the cottages of the "Golden Lane" at the Prague castle, the Stiassney Jubilee Synagogue, the Venice of Prague and find a sculpture known as "Proudy". We finish our day in the U Fleku Beer Hall with a very large beer and some very bad (mandatory) food. "Dobro chut" as they say here. At 9 p.m. we hurry through heavy rain to check in with the gang at our Prague Hotel. We have missed a couple of "mandatory" challenges because of not stopping in Ljubljana, but hope that we will receive only a relatively minor penalty as incurred by other teams' infractions on previous legs. No such luck this time - our scavenges are not even going to be reviewed. Now we really regret not flying after all, and are VERY glad that we had not paid large entrance fees for fleeting visits to sites like the Jewish Ghetto Cemetery in Prague. A depressing end to the leg as we get our bags packed and ready to head to Washington D.C. on an early flight the next morning.