across Poland

......people drive crazy here.  With precision, but crazy.  We get buzzed all the time at by cars and trucks doing 100kph on roads with no shoulder.  And plenty of close call passing on the two lane roads makes my bread delivery passing in NH look wimpy.  It seemed for the first couple days drivers here were just super precise but later we found out (from Kasia) that its because they are also careless.  Still they drive with much more skill than in the states, if we were on roads like this in the states we would be in the hospital.  But when you're literally getting blown off the road by a truck, which happened twice, its a bit much.  It was stressful and exhausting at times but we made it to Krakow in one piece.

We basically went south down the east side of Poland and then curved west to Krakow.  The northern part is mostly flat and has lush green countryside with livestock farms and forests.  The Polish really love their forests even though it just seemed to be a bunch of trees to us.  As we progressed south the land became drier with more vegetable crops.  Lots of haying as the weather was nice and sunny every day, not too hot either.  Kinda reminded me of some of the tour de Toona stages actually, especially the crisp morning air with windy farm roads.  Then there were a lot of orchards for a day while the terrain became rolling.  Most of the meat consumed here seems to be pork which makes me wonder where all the pig farms are.  Closing in on Krakow we could see the southern foothills in the haze....we'll be there soon.

Riding with Jen has been ideal, no going off course to see silly tourist junk.  Just keep going and find what we find.  We managed to connect a couple old town spots, I wonder if all the villages were like that before the war.  But there are a few items Jen needs (Hi there Kyle:) for touring:  a full BOB fender (for my face), 165mm crankarms (for her knees), more than one pair of socks (for her feet), and a real handlebar bag (so she can store something outside her BOB trailer).  Even though she is the experienced tourist I still know these things.  At least she replaced the helmit she cracked up in Lithuania with the delux model for $11 from a grocery store.  Its actually kinda nice and features a bug screen on the front vents.

Back to Poland...the scenery has been much better than in the Baltics, but due to the flatness, hard to capture in pictures.  Still I take some shots here and there especially because my mom really wants to see pictures of Poland.  I am about 1/3 Polish (my biggest chunk of ancestry) and I think my mom is half Polish and that's mostly why I insisted on Poland being on the route.  Many of the locals were helpful despite the language barrier.

One family, the Kalberczyk's, went well beyond helpful and invited us to camp in their yard and wash our clothes after our longest day in Poland of 150k.  We had rolled into the town of Kurow kinda zapped looking for a motel.  A nice guy sitting with his friends outside the local "Sklep" phoned his english speaking daughter, Kasia, to help us out.  She spoke great english and we had so much fun talking that we ended up at their house for our second home stay of the trip.  It was a great experience to get a peek at what life is like here.  We sure wish Kasia and family the best and hope she gets to travel someday!  She and her brother Thomas even escorted us out of town on bikes the next morning.

 As we approached our halfway rest stop in Krakow we began to struggle with being tired.  One day Jen just called it quits early when we had a tailwind and went to sleep.  I pulled a bunch the next day, dragging Jen into the wind on my drops for a few hours and paid for it the day after when she had to tow me in the last hour or so.  We've stayed in motels because they're cheap and easier than camping when zapped.  Two days ago it felt like I was pedaling underwater, the only way I could tell how fast I was going was to look at the spedometer.  But we've made it just fine and even found Jen some new tires yesterday.

So now its two days off the bike and just some walking around Krakow which I believe is the only city in Poland that didn't get destroyed in the war.  I will take some pictures, I hope to plug select pictures into all the blogs from Germany in 3 weeks or so.