Castle? Where?

Everyone keeps telling me that there are castles and lakes everywhere in the Czech Republic and I am completely stoked because I love castles and lakes or really any cool remotely old stone structure and any body of water to go swimming in.  My first week here and I had yet to see a castle or recognize one...It was now becoming a mission to see one.  My hosts have an old red VW Polo and as I was the only one who could drive a stick I was given the car for Sunday afternoon to go drive to 3 castles that were nearby with Caroline the girl from Texas.  Oh yeah we were also given a map with lots of different colored roads which I will come back to later.  So off we went driving around the Bohemian countryside with our headlights on because that is the law looking for castles and lakes.  First off driving around in a foreign country with not really the slightest clue if you are going the right way let alone what the speed limit is and feeling like you are going way too fast because your speedometer is in kms--freakin fantastic!!!  It turns out some of those roads on the map are just trails or dirt paths. I ended up on some farmers fields a couple times. We kept driving around this one town the size of a four way stop sign eventually taking every road possible trying to find the 'Pink Castle' (hey at least I had a color to look for;))-while doing this great driving feat we kept buzzing a family loading up a tractor-the first time they looked a little curious after the 4th time they were laughing at us... we stopped to ask for directions and the Grandpa, older daughter and grandkids all pushed there heads in the window on top of Caroline looking at the map and then pointing in about 3 different directions and speaking in Czech which neither of us could understand--we nodded and smiled and then drove off to find a ligitimate road and we agreed to give up the castle search.  Instead we went to a cave and found it without incident!!! We bought our tickets and walked into the earth with our English translation paper of the tour guides' talk.  The cave has been kept in its original condition since the 1800's with all its decorations-which were 'hey I think that rock looks like a devil or hey that would really look like a dragon if we put red glass eyes onto it, and my favorite -this rock looks like a witch especially if we bring in some quartz rocks and put a light underneath it!'  It was so dark in the cave we could not really read our translation so we just bumped into things and tried not to fall down steep slippery stairs.  My favorite part was when they lead us into a cavern turned all the lights off and played organ Dracula music for no apparent reason other than to give the tour guide a laugh.  We made it home with out getting lost but all in all a great day for finding zippo castles!!