"Splendor forever lies in wait about each one of us in all its fullness, but veiled from view, deep down, invisible, far off. It is there, though, not hostile, not reluctant, not deaf. If you summon it by the right word, by its right name, it will come. This is the essence of magic, which does not create, but summons." --Franz Kafka, Diaries, October 18, 1921

The Magical Mystery Literary History Tour was aptly named. Beginning the first day and culminating the last one, the Kafka Project's mission in Eastern Europe has been smiled on by the mysterious forces that moved me to undertake it. As I compile the results of the research for a final report, I'd like to tell you about only two of the forty days: the first and the last. Then you tell me if you think magic is afoot! 

We left San Diego on June 15 (see Episode #1 Magical Literary History Tour) and landed in Prague the next day, June 16. When we arrived at our hotel, Judita Matyasova, an impish 29-year old Czech woman with her own Franz Kafka project, was waiting for me with a reporter from a leading Czech newspaper. Lucie Bartosova, pictured at center below, an editor at Lidove Noviny, was the first of three sets of journalists and photographers we met with that afternoon.

Following our interview, Lucie told me that she read my book in a library a few years ago, but always wanted her own copy, which she had just received from England a few days earlier. As she leafed through it again, she thought: "I'd love to meet the author." The next day, she learned I was coming to town and got the assignment to interview me.

Hi fellow online travelers! Tomorrow we head for Silesia, where we have made a wonderful contact with a professor, Pawel Jedrzejko, at the University of Silesia, who is very enthusiastic about helping in our mission to find a missing literary treasure.  I'm looking forward to meeting and I hope working with him. This was exactly the kind of person we needed to connect to, and it's thanks to a lovely staff at the US Consulate in Krakow. On Thursday we headed south for the weekend and spent a lovely weekend in Zab, a small village in the Tatra mountains of Poland, about a three hour drive from Krakow. Byron wanted to write this one for you. So I give you LaDue who has "The View from Kafka's Head."

By Byron LaDue: We had given up on finding the sanatorium where Franz Kafka spent several months attempting to recover from tuberulosis. We didn't have much to go on. All we had was that Kafka had stayed at a sanatorium at Matliary in the Tatra mountains in Czechoslovakia. Kathi googled Matliary, but only a few references came up, nothing specific to the name or place today. There were Kafka references that related to Dora's story (this was the place Kafka met Klopstock, whose words "Who knows Dora knows what love means" are on Dora's tombstone.) There was also a picture of Kafka at Matliary. We have been staying on the Polish side of the Tatra mountains. Matliary would be on the Slovakian side. Ever since she saw them in the distance on our first trip to Poland in 2001, to research Dora's life in Bedzin for her book, Kathi's wanted to go to the Tatra Mountains. We are now at the base of the Tatras, about a three hour drive from Krakow, just outside the main town of Zakopane at a lovely hotel called Redyk in the village of Zab, the highest village in Poland, where you can see outside our window a lovely view of Polish farmland backed by mountains. Friday we visited the main village of Zakopane and found it to be a very popular tourist location for Polish families. There was a long line of traffic leading into the village offering a water park, river rafting, mountain trams, biking and a huge outdoor pedestrian alpine mall, Krupowki Street, several blocks long full of pedestrian traffic. There was a multitude of shops, street entertainers (including an actual dog-and-pony show) and a waffle and fruit treat which I couldn't resist.

We took a tram up into the foothills in the direction of our village, Zab, and then walked along an extensive row of vendors and rode back down the mountain on a chairlift.  It was a lot of sightseeing, a lot of walking and a lot of tourists. Having done Zakopane on Friday we decided that on Saturday we would just "drive around." We took off around noon in our rented Hyundai Getz with a hazy destination of another mountain tram located on our tourist map.

Before we knew it we were driving from Poland into Slovakia, which is now a separate country from the Czech Republic. We found the small village where the tram was located, a place called Tatranska Lominca. I changed some Polish Zloty into Slovakian Crowns (different from Czech Crowns) and we had lunch at a roadside hotel to get our bearings.