I took my first solo trip in a few years this month. I’m switching jobs and have a nice little 3-month Sabbatical between ending one and starting another. Given the time away from work, I decided to spend 8 days in Prague in October. It was a new destination for me. It appeared on my radar largely due to the Honest Guide YouTube channel, which makes Prague look like a very attractive place to visit. I had considered a 3-week trek through Czechia (including Prague), but for family reasons, I ended up going with the shorter trip to Prague.
My resources for planning the trip included Honest Guide videos, the Rick Steves Prague & Czech Republic guide, numerous Google searches, and numerous YouTube videos.
The timing of the trip was partially guided by flight costs. I got a decent deal on a “Delta One” (business class) fare that included the last JFK-Prague flight for the season. That gave me a chance to check out the new Delta One lounge at JFK. It’s a very sharp-looking lounge. The food is a step up from the Sky Club, but certainly nothing earth shattering. To me, it kind of feels like Sysco Plus in the Delta One Lounge versus Sysco Basic in the Sky Club lounge. The Delta One lounge has a sit-down, full-service restaurant that requires a reservation and allows one to eat dinner before the flight. I decided to try that and to decline the in-flight meal. Honestly, the menu is about the same for plane and restaurant, and the restaurant food did not strike me as particularly superior to plane food.
As for lodging, I stayed at Hotel Haštal. I liked the hotel quite a bit. Front desk staff were professional, friendly and helpful. Breakfast was great. The neighborhood was reasonably quiet, even though it was just a few blocks off Old Town Square. I reserved the one room in the hotel with a balcony; I enjoyed sitting on it in the evening while watching the world go by. The morning breakfast buffet had many hot and cold choices. My biggest criticism is that the WiFi dropped out from time to time – not for a long time, but just long enough to be annoying and long enough to lose connections on WiFi phone calls. My second criticism is bad coffee – both the brewed coffee in the breakfast area (weak) and the coffee from the espresso machine in the lobby (not very pleasing flavor to me). Happily, there was a great hole-in-the-wall coffee shop half a block down the street called ONESIP COFFEE. Great coffee with a young, friendly staff.