Europe, a winter wanderland

Teeny flakes of snow were dropping steadily in Prague at the beginning of my winter journey to Europe. Snow is a blessing for winter sports, but I was trying to tour like a summer nomad, visiting parks and museums and churches and restaurants.

In the late Prague afternoon, I walked outside my hotel, into a fine white cloud of the freezing stuff. My friends had told me I was bonkers for touring Europe the first week of March. They were vacationing in places where the sun was actually able to warm something — the Caribbean Sea, for instance. I would have none of it. I wanted low-cost airfares and easy-to-book hotels, and I didn't want to wait in lines during precious time abroad.

Now, I was beginning to have second thoughts. I had no boots. I had a decent winter jacket and a knit cap, but I didn't bring the layers I would need for bitter cold, if it came. I began to fret, in a traveler's chauvinistic mind-set, as if the Czech Republic didn't have sweaters or undershirts amid some of Eastern Europe's great shopping.

That's when I took a look around, through the air filled with streams of white, and discovered the great pleasure of touring a place like Prague off-season, in wintertime. The afternoon light had turned to early winter darkness, and in the streetlights, I saw a city whose design from Gothic, medieval and Renaissance heydays remained unspoiled.

The snow covering the city was a time machine that thrust me into another context. Everything twinkled. Everything looked fresh. I was no longer in Prague. I was inside the pages of a storybook.

Better yet, it was winter, so the city was mine. Its residents were tucked inside their homes, and the crowds of summer were — well, they were with my friends on islands where the temperature of the ocean was in the mid-80s. There were no crowds jamming to get into anything in Prague.

I walked up the impossibly steep hill to Prague Castle, alone, my footprints in the snow the only sign of life on the street in the past minutes.

I finally reached the magnificent castle, now home to the nation's president. Behind it, the regal spires of St. Vitus' Cathedral jutted to the eerily orange-lit, frozen heavens.