May 12 roaming around

We woke up and had another lovely breakfast in Poland. Sorry guys, we forgot to take photos, as we left our camera in our room.

We drive into Czech Republic today, headed towards the center of the glass industry town, Jablonec nad Nisou.

We are just minutes away from the border and we get flagged down by the police. They ask for our ID and the car rental paperwork. They look at everything, call someone and come back to speak with Guy. Guy asked them if they are having problems at the borders with the refugees coming in. They says yes, from Syria and Russia there are many people trying to come to Czech Republic. They tell us all is okay and we can keep going on into Czech. Could you just imagine if we were denied entry? What would our whole tour group do without us????

So we arrive in Czech and drive thru the lovely mountain range until we get to the huge old Preciosa factory building (remember it used to be Jablonex)

J-Me decides to walk over to the front of the building to see if there are any beads or any scraps of glass. She finds the remnants of old glass tile pieces. 

Then we head over to The small Preciosa shop which sells many glass items in it. 

Leaving Desna, we make a quick stop at an antik shop to see if they have anything interesting, and we score some antique lampwork flowers on metal wire stems, some glass buttons, some cute porcelain animals, and some other miscellaneous goodies.

We drive to our hotel and check in, unload our suitcases and have lunch. 

We are then ready to go head out and see a bead factory. Yeah!!!! The excitement is building. 

We were able to see the table cutting machines. It is so time consuming to make those lovely beads. 

Here is just one of our table cut beads we sell.

Here is one of our shapes we have had for a few years now. It is a rose petal.

 This is the graphite mold used to make the rose petal bead.

here is the rose petal bead.

After we were finished shopping, we then discuss how we wanted some of our beads tied. 

Then off we went, back to our hotel.

Next stop is dinner. We all decided on Italian tonight.

 Dinner over, we settled into our room, and relaxed over a glass of scotch on the rocks. At least Guy and Mom did…. J-Me fired up the computer and checked emails, worked on the blog and generally made us two look like a bunch of degenerates.

Thats all folks, we're off to bed. Tomorrow Guy heads to the airport to pick up the rest of the tour group.