Pec Pod Snezkou to Wroclaw

Jon

This is now our second day in Wroclaw - we can't connect to the hotel's WiFi for some reason - apparantly a problem with Vista (running on my laptop - what a mistake!!!). So here's the write up on the travelling from yesterday onwards...

After another meat-laden breakfast (for me, Toni is a fish-veggie) we headed up the mountain towards the Polish border. The process of packing the panniers, getting changed, setting up the bike and then setting off has now become routine. It still helps when you can park the bike outside the hotel though.




We started at around 750m altitude and blasted up the mountain side towards to border.



Then we zig-zagged all the way down... the bike was happy until the GPS tried to take us on a back road which was full of the infamous Polish pot-holes. The picture below shows the profile of the bulk of yesterday's driving:



As we hadn't booked digs in advance we navigated to the tourist info. Well, the GSP did it really, to within about 25 meters. This is probably a good time comment on the GPS. I've the Garmin Zumo 550, which comes pre-loaded with European mapping including street level maps for nearly all of Western Europe. Part of the Czech Republic and Slovakia don't have that much detail, but certainly enough for our needs. With the unit comes a copy of MapSource which also contains the same maps. Both the GPS and the software allow planning of routes, waypoints, searching of addresses and features, etc. Due to the cost, around £480, I had felt guilty about buying it, until I hit Germany. Since then it has allowed me, and then both of us, to get wherever we want without worrying about getting lost. We can also pre-plan a scenic day's driving and, if we so decide, re-route using the fastest roads in a couple of seconds. Without the unit we'd have undoubtably lost a lot of time trying to use the European road map (which we've brought with us) to get around. From past experience it's often difficult to keep tabs on where in the world you are, especially if the weather turns bad. I now believe that the GPS, along with the weather and relaxed attitude we both have to the trip, has helped make it what it is. Interestingly the GPS now has me around 1000 miles from home by the quickest route!

Toni

So, we left Pec Pod and headed for the Polish border and Wroclaw. The journey was fabulous. Blue sky and sunshine all the way! Crossing the border and weaving down the mountain was amazing. We really enjoyed the ride. Then we arrived in Wroclaw, hot and tired. After (finally) sorting out the parking for the bike (none at the hotel!) we headed into town for a well earnt "kawa" - coffee. Starting to pick up a little of the language now. We are recognizing things on menus, street signs and how to say thank you and goodbye - more importantly I can ask for 2 beers and ask if it possible for me to smoke!!! Even better, the Polish can understand me - even if they do answer in English!!

Last night (Mon 07/05/07) we went to a pizza place, had two very large wood-fired pizzas, couple of beers each and a salad for roughly £15. (That is expensive compared to meals so far, but we are in a city now!!) Funny thing is that beer here is much cheaper than coffee or coke!
This afternoon (Tues 08/05) we crossed the Odra river to the Old Town and spent some time looking at the Cathedral "Katedra sw. Jana Chrzciciela" and other surrounding churches - very beautiful! Then we went to the Botanical Gardens. This was amazing, whilst the sun was shining, then we got caught in a huge thunderstorm. Not a good place to be with all those massive trees!!! We sheltered for a while with a coffee (and Jon had to have cake of course!) Thinking it was sweet to feed the tiny birds cake, it swiftly turned into scene from the Hitchcock film as the damn things swooped at our heads!





We mooched our way back towards hotel to try and dry out a bit, stopping off briefly to look at what we thought was the railway station. Turned out to be a huge indoor market hall, full of amazing fruit and veg and food stalls. If only we still had markets like that at home!!



PS: more piccies on blog site but only 3 mins of battery left! Byee all!!!