2010 Trip to Eastern Europe and the Baltics

Journal Pages
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Getting There

Budapest

Krakow

Warsaw

Lithuania & Latvia

Estonia

Latvia & Lithuania

Gdansk

 Getting Home

Wroclaw and the Trip Home - With Delay

August 7

We left Gdansk with a nearly empty gas tank – whoops – and we couldn’t find a gas station! It was a near thing, but we eventually found a gas station in a small town en route. We drove through the productive countryside, through small towns replete with road side sanctuaries typical of this very Catholic country and arrived in Wroclaw. This is another beautiful town (we had no idea there would be so many pretty towns in Poland).

        The Town Hall

We had a nice dinner on the town square and enjoyed watching the locals have a good time (beer must be the national beverage).

This time of year the storks have returned from Africa and they are everywhere - they are so beautiful. They build their large and improbable looking nests everywhere and the Poles have thoughtfully provided platforms for many nests.

Another thing that was fun about Wroclaw was the little gnomes, which are little bronze statues scattered around town. We bought a gnome map at the Tourist Information and tried to follow the gnome trail. There is an interesting history about the gnomes, which we found on the Internet - see http://batorego.wordpress.com/2007/08/22/the-gnomes-of-worclaw/ - look about 60% of the way down the page for the story.

                The Gnomes

    A bronze zoo

August 8

We drove through the Tatra Mountains on our way to Prague. There were many ski resorts and small towns along the way. By now, we were ready to return to the US. We returned the car in Prague and checked into our hotel in order to be ready for an early flight the next morning.

August 9

To the airport on time – except the plane was late – so we missed our connection in Paris (Charles de Gaulle has got to be the worst airport in the world - I believe we said that in the first page of this journal). Air France put us up in a terrible hotel near the airport. Tom got in touch with our friend Douglas who drove out to the airport to take us into the town. We saw his new apartment, then went down to Paris Plage, which was lively with families, buskers and lovers. Douglas delivered us back to our hotel, where we had a surprisingly good meal courtesy of Air France. Go figure – a dive of a hotel with good food.

August 10

At last – homeward bound. However, the people in the seat in front of us had two small children who were spoiled rotten and ran all over the place. Across the plane was a baby who was in obvious discomfort and nothing the mother or grandmother could do would comfort the poor tyke. As I said, air travel is difficult and uncomfortable.

We would love to go back to Hungary and Poland – we like the scenery, history and food. The Baltic areas are interesting, but rather undeveloped. Best of all for this trip was seeing family and meeting previously unknown family members!