Archbishops Palace and Gardens in Kroměříž, Czech Republic

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I don’t know how you spent your day, but Masayo and I spent ours in stunning little Kroměříž, Czech Republic, mostly walking around Kroměříž Gardens behind the Archbishop’s Palace and exploring the UNESCO-inscribed town’s various streets and alleyways. You know, just your typical Thursday. Unfortunately, my streak of high post-dinner blood sugars also stayed typical today.

Before breakfast my BG was 212 which, given my risky eating and insulin last night, wasn’t a shock or anything. We’d opted for the breakfast option this morning at Penzion Kroměříž and when we went downstairs to check it out it was huge – a buffet, but we were the only customers.

There was a huge basket of breads and a large platter of lunch meat and cheese — plus the usual cereals, milk, yogurt, juice, coffee, etc. They even had packages of cookies and a basket with bananas and apples. Talk about a tough diabetic challenge! Could I eat what I wanted from this meal and not go over 300? Could I even stay below 200??

I took a large shot and ate what I could, since I always stuff myself at these buffet breakfasts. It makes dosing Humalog tricky, but it means I don’t have to eat (i.e., buy) lunch. Saving money is part of the skill of a trip like this.

So that’s what I did today — ate until I could hold no more. Incidentally, in Japan there is a rule of thumb that you should eat until you feel 80% full. Not 150% which is what my fellow Americans often seem to do. I’m usually ok with this rule but at a breakfast buffet the gloves are off.

I even snuck a package of cookies and a banana in my pocket — and innocent little Masayo took a whole big roll and a bag of tea for later too. My cookies would be for low BG, and the banana would be for lunch.

The perfect crime.

After breakfast we headed out to see the so-called Kroměříž Archbishop’s Palace, which is a very large and extensively-decorated residence built in the late 1400s which housed the bishops of Olomouc in the 18th century. Got all that? Today it is a UNESCO World Heritage Site and includes the even larger gardens behind it.

We went up to the big medieval front door but it was closed and locked; the Palace seems to be shut for the season. So it goes when you travel around Europe in November.

Thankfully, the gardens were still open and they’re free. So we walked around them — far around. The land they occupy is really big, mostly flat and full of trees and well-manicured grass. Closer to the palace there are fountains and gazebos and hedges, while further afield there are just little paths through the trees. Everything feels far away, very isolated not only from the wider world but from the rest of Kroměříž itself.

What a place to perambulate and get lost for a while.

There were some exotic birds and monkeys in cages as we entered the Gardens, and best of all for me were the peacocks and peahens wandering around. How cool — live peacocks strolling around at our feet! The Gardens were also full of squirrels and ducks. It felt like we were visiting their home, so we nodded in deference to them when we saw them.

There were very few people, though – it was a chilly day and definitely not the tourist season. What a huge place to have basically to ourselves. Walking all around this huge place, we’d need the energy from that extensive breakfast!

After spending an hour or so on the outer edges of the Gardens we returned to the Palace itself and found some stairs up to a large balcony on the back of the building that gave a nice view over some ornately-shaped hedges. I checked my BG here – I wasn’t especially curious what it was yet, but I couldn’t pass up the chance for a cool diabetes selfie. Despite the huge breakfast I was only 182. Slightly high but excellent, considering my 200s and 300s lately.

Back in town we found a little cafe called Cukrárna where I got a coffee and a cake made into a yellow smiley face. The coffee was good (but full of coffee grounds, just like the mysterious coffee we had in Malbork, Poland) but the cake wasn’t. It was way too sweet, its icing like candy, and the bready part inside was a little hard like it wasn’t fresh.

But it still was nice to eat something small for lunch after the big breakfast and the walk around the ponds and gardens of the Palace. I took a shot at the table through my pants into my legs.

We walked some more, out to the edge of town in a residential part (which I usually like to see at least once when we go to a new town). But it was getting dark so we headed back, stopping at a bakery to buy something for breakfast tomorrow. (We didn’t opt for the pension’s breakfast for both days.)

At 5 pm, after all this walking and the sweet yellow icing cake, I was 173. Pretty much where I want to be, maybe a tad high. Dinner was takeout Asian food from a place in town with a Vietnamese name — Ha Long, in keeping with our habit of eating culturally unrelated cuisine in a place.

Mine was diabetically going to be tough. I had breaded chicken nuggets with a pile of noodles, plus a can of beer and the cookies I’d swiped from the breakfast buffet. I knew noodles could be much higher in carbs than they looked, so I tried to take enough Humalog.

Again I judged wrong, ending up at 302 at 10:00 pm. But I was still hungry, so I took a large shot to get my BG down and to eat some cheese and crackers I’d bought at the store. Lots of food, lots of insulin — hope the balance is ok.

Kroměříž has been stunning and spectacular, with a surprising range of sights and areas to see that are all fascinating and extremely pleasant. Despite its small size, there’s a lot going on here. But tomorrow we have to leave; it’s time to move on to the next town, a place we’d first seen in a motorcycle documentary that Ewan MacGregor did a few years ago: a town called Kutná Hora and its amazing church of human bones!

Have you ever been with peacocks not in cages?

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