Prague

Question: What do you do when you're traveling and one of your kids gets the flu?

Answer: You...just keep sight-seeing...? <insert nervous, self-conscious laugh>

Gulp.

I will win no mother-of-the-year awards for this one.

Let me defend my decision to drag a feverish, sick kid across Europe:
Firstly I get to blame my own parents who, when I was in grammar school and suffering from the chicken pox, hauled me around on our family vacation through Yosemite.  My protests of "I don't feel good" were met with firm commands to get over it because I was ruining everyone's holiday jocularity with my complaining. So there's that to consider.

Also, I'm a nurse.  It's difficult not to perform an assessment on an otherwise perfectly healthy teenager who happens to have a flu and conclude "eh, I've seen worse" (reminds me of that scene from The Princess Bride when Miracle Max looks at dead Wesley and delivers the same line).

Also in my defense is the fact that we were somewhere in Germany with a couple of days' drive just to get back to Obedin so why not let him hole up in a hotel (a really awesome hotel) in Prague and sleep some of it off in the comfort of a bed instead of in the van?

Poor kid.  He tried his best.  If you ask him, I think Mircea would say that his favorite part of travel is the food. When sight-seeing we can generally coerce many miles from his feet with the promise of a good meal at the end. But that first night in Prague he just stared at his plate with the glassy-eyed look people get when they feel like crap.  And although his dinner contained two of his favorite items: crepes and meat, (honestly, I had no idea Czech cuisine was so good) he merely licked his spoon once and then spent the remainder of the meal slumped in his chair.

So instead of exploring the city at night we took him back to the hotel and let him sleep.  As I said, the hotel was awesome (yes, I realize I overuse that word).  It was like something out of a communist-era film set in East Germany during the height of the Cold War with wire tapping and fedoras.  It even had one of those old-fashioned cage elevators which I managed to ride in twice without hyperventilating. (And it came with a rather steep price tag so we consoled ourselves that we were at least getting our money's worth by spending a lot of time there that evening).

The next day there wasn't enough of an improvement to justify forcing him out into the cold but there we were, smack dab in the middle of the city I had heard so many people rave about and praise.  What to do?
Sure I could claim we spent the day bathing his forehead with cool damp cloths but we've got the photos to prove we set forth from the hotel at least once.

The fact is, we left him behind.  My yard stick for measuring the level of a kid's illness is whether or not they are able to play their DSI in bed.  The previous night the answer was no but that morning he announced his improvement by asking permission to use the laptop.  Ok.  Not well enough to consume more than a sip of orange juice at breakfast but well enough to find a song he wanted to download means not well enough to explore but well enough to leave behind while we did so. And we didn't leave him alone, his ten year old brother was there.  And we gave them strict instructions not to get in the bathtub and assured them the hotel staff all spoke English...

Question: Was Prague worth it?

Answer: I don't know, I was so busy worrying about my kids that I really didn't pay any attention

Marius, this one is for you.

Okay, I was actually paying a little bit of attention but just so you know, my knowledge of the political and cultural history of Prague is embarrassingly scant.  I do know that a few years ago the city began a project to restore much of the historic Old Town which included re-cobblestoning many of the roads and installing gas lights on the streets. Something went well because it's absolutely lovely.  

Included among the places we went was the famous Prague Castle but we had heard it takes at least a day to do it justice so we skirted the perimeter and that was it.  (I'm sure it will be there next time.)  We also crossed the much-celebrated St. Charles Bridge but at this point I'm overly-saturated with statues of the crucified Christ, popes and saints.  So we skipped across that rather dismissively.

An unexpected delight was the statue of Winston Churchill placed seemingly at random on an obscure corner street, unconnected (from what we could tell) to anything close by that would provide a clue as to why there was a bust of the British statesman stuck against a building.  I love those moments.  It's what makes touring a city by foot such a delight.