Where did our Silvia take us this time?

[CzechSilvia]

It seems that the main purpose of the S12 I've been working on will be to take me and my wife on trips. I thought about starting this thread to share pics and some facts about the places we visit and since most of you guys are from the other side of the world, some of you might find the places interesting. This thread will be mostly off topic so if you think it should not be here, just say the word and I'll take it down. The trips will mostly be to the different parts of the Czech Republic which consists of 3 regions: Bohemia, Moravia, and Silesia. Also I'll be using Czech diacritic here so let me know if you have troubles viewing the czech-specific letters.

The first trip me and my wife took in the Silvia was to Křivoklát castle. It is located in the Central Bohemia Region about 60km west of Prague.

There had been fortified settlement on the what is now Křivoklát since the bronze age but the castle itself was built by the king of Bohemia Přemysl Otakar II in the 13th century. The Castle belonged to the kings of Bohemia for most of it's life and was damaged and in some cases almost completely destroyed by fire several times. It's role changed throughout the centuries, it was used as defensive fortress, royal hunting lodge and later also as a prison. It has been rebuilt several times and it received its current appearance in 1826.


We got up pretty early and the sun was just still pretty low when we were leaving Prague.


Silvia with a random rock in the background. The car ran great and the roads were twisty and fun, I haven't had this much fun while driving in ages!


Stumbled upon a horse pasture on our way there.


"CASTLE" getting closer


And there it is! Křivoklát.


We climbed a nearby hill to get a better look at the castle.


Unfortunately, it was Sunday and all the exhibitions were closed but the inside courtyard was open.


It was pretty windy up on the ramparts.


And we got to meet this sorry little Ricer Honda on our way back.

Let me know if you're interested in more posts like this. I sure as hell am interested in the trips you do in your s12, feel free to post about them here!

[kelso840]

I dig it. Wish my country was old enough for castles.

[deucekazoo]

I like it. The more pictures the better.

[rednucleus]

Love the centuries old stuff! Keep up the pics and enjoy your road trips.

[weitrhino]

Eminently cool stuff. Keep it coming!

[SchizophrenicMC]

Remind me to pester you for a really good picture of that 1.8 Turbo decal some time. I need it for reasons.

[CzechSilvia]

Remind me to pester you for a really good picture of that 1.8 Turbo decal some time. I need it for reasons.

I'll ask my wife to redraw the decal in a vector format so that it can be printed. She can do that, she's cool.

[CzechSilvia]

It's adventure time!

Today we went to see Kokořín castle and we visited some other interesting spots along the way. All the places we visited are located in the northern part of central Bohemia. The bedrock in this area is mostly sandstone so the nature there is quite interesting. And the hairpins were fun!



Our first stop were the Devil's Heads near the village Želízy. It's a sculpture by Václav Levý chiseled in a rock above the village.




The Devil's Heads. Václav Levý chiseled them in the sandstone between the years 1841-1846. Why? I don't know, probably because they look cool.

Next, we drove to the Kokořín castle. It was built in 1320 by a Bohemian knight Hynek Berka of Dubé. It was conquered and heavily damaged after a siege during the Hussite Wars in 1426 . It was left in ruins and abandoned for quite some time after that. Then a lot of history happened, Bohemia kingdom was conquered by the Austrians and Czech people lost their freedom for about 300 years, this period is called the Dark Age here. Anyway, it didn't help the castle much that during this time Ferdinand II of house Habsburg added Kokořín to the cursed castles list which included castles and fortresses that were forbidden to be maintained or repaired because their strategic placement could be threat to the occupying Habsburg monarchy. In 1894 the castle was finally repaired and it gained its current appearance in 1916.


As always, the castle is on a hill.






Unfortunately, it's still off season for castle visits so the gate is closed and we couldn't get inside. From the look of it, there originally used to be a drawbridge but it was replaced by this lame footbridge.

We wandered in the woods around the area to get better view of the castle and my wife took some nice pics of the nature around there.






And there it is. It's pretty hard to get a good photo of the castle, it's either too close to fit in the picture or hidden behind trees.

On our way back we visited a "stone castle" Nedamy. These are artificial caves dug in the sandstone not far from Kokořín castle. It is believed that they were dug in prehistoric times but it is certain that  the caves were used as a hideout for protestants during the Thirty Years' War.




Remains of steps carved in the rock.




The steps are deformed from hundreds of years of use.


See...


awesome trip.

[rednucleus]

Uh oh, pics are not working for me
Never mind, now I see them

[weitrhino]

So fascinating to hear of the history and see structures of the kind we simply don't have in the US.

[iceageg]

I'll ask my wife to redraw the decal in a vector format so that it can be printed. She can do that, she's cool.

I can also reproduce any of these graphics in vector format for future reference.  I just need a clean picture taken strait on (not at an angle) with a ruler or tape measurer included to accurately reference the size.

[CzechSilvia]

This time we took the s12 to a small car meet at a restaurant car park just 30 minutes from our home. There were some cars that I thought would be interesting for you guys that live in the U.S.

And who says the Silvia is not a family car? Even the stroller fits nicely in the boot of the s12.






The pics from the meet:

[weitrhino]

That's a lot of pics. Unfortunately none of them show up for me.

[CzechSilvia]

That's a lot of pics. Unfortunately none of them show up for me.

That's weird, do pictures in my other posts show up? I have just checked on a different computer and they show up in Chrome and in MS Edge, maybe Dropbox was down for a while....

[SchizophrenicMC]

You have to be signed into dropbox on the browser you're using in order to view images hosted on dropbox. I recommend switching to imgur for hosting.

[weitrhino]

None of the pics in this thread work now, although they used to show. I've followed this thread from the beginning and I'm currently signed into my dropbox account in my current browser although that had never been an issue before now.

[SchizophrenicMC]

Weird. I still say imgur is a better solution.

[weitrhino]

Mac OS 10.12.6 via Safari 11.1.......no pics in this thread. iOS 11.3.1......no pics that way, either.

Chrome works.

[Redneck]

I'm a little late to the party but nice thread czech. Pictures are displaying fine for me and I don't have a dropbox account. It's weird noticing small differences in euro model stuff sometimes. I'm not an sw20 expert by any means, just know the basics about them, but I instantly noticed the front bumper seemed to look a little different from the american models. Sure enough here is a stock usdm model front end for comparison.



And euro.



Not a huge difference but the relocated side marker light and front light going orange/clear/orange on the euro model really makes the front end look a lot sleeker in my opinion. Same thing with your tail lights. Love the Mk1 s12 euro tail lights. They just look soooo much sleeker then the Mk1 s12 american tail lights. The usdm Mk1 "6 pack" tail lights aren't necessarily ugly but I don't really find them sleek or sexy either.

Anyway, don't want to derail the thread topic, just seems like a fair amount of the euro model stuff has small differences compared to the usdm cars that make them look more streamlined and sleeker. And as an american getting the often slightly uglier usdm stuff... I'm jealous haha.

[CzechSilvia]

This time the Silvia took us to a tackday! The track is in the town Vysoke Myto, it's about two hour trip from Prague so we got up early to be there before 8am.



There was a pretty neat castle along the way there but we didn't have time to stop and take pictures so here's one from the internet. The castle is called Kunteticka Hora and it's from early 15th century.



The track in Vysoke Myto is very technical and fairly slow, in other words - perfect for the s12. And by slow I mean you only get in the third gear on the main straight at the bottom of the picture and in the section with the two straights connected by the highspeed corner at the top of the picture, you don't need the fourth gear. I could only run three laps before the tyres overheated and I think the brakes were past their limit somewhere around the fourth lap. And here's some pictures of me and my s12.









Check out that sidewall flex in the last picture! I run the Bridgestone RE002 and I absolutely love them, best tyres I've ever had on a car, they're great in dry and wet as well. Shame they don't make the newer generation in this size. The ca18et is now running on 0.7 Bar (10psi) and it has never ran better. The only problem with the car that I have encountered during the trackday is that one time, when I was on fourth or fifth lap, my powersteering overheated, the power steering fluid (I use the FSM recommended atf) started to boil and overflow the reservoir cap. I've have never heard this could be an issue in an s12! Interesting thing to discover...

People brought a lot of interesting cars but I think the s12 was probably the oldest car there and it definitely was the only one with a child seat in the back (the baby wasn't in the car when I was on the track of course, maybe when she's older...). It also attracted a lot of attention, there was always someone asking me questions about the car, taking a picture of it or just looking at it wondering what the hell it is - it is very rare around here. I invited some of the people that were interested in the car to ride in the passenger seat and they were completely blown away by how fast this old car can be on the track. Best weekend of the year so far!