Poland 2024

We've been back home for about a month now. We had a busy summer, even after the trip, and so it took me a while to catch up on all the writing for this travelog. I spent a lot of time writing it because, though the trip was memorable, I wanted to capture a lot of the details before my recollections started to get hazy. I wrote mostly for myself and Vicky as a way to preserve what for us was a great trip. But I hope anyone else who might read this will find it entertaining and maybe a little informative. This final post serves as a wrap-up, and here I give some of the things we learned about travel that we'll take forward on future trips. Poland I'm really glad we went to Poland for our first trip abroad in over a decade. I would  recommend a trip there to anyone who has Polish heritage. The experience helped me to understand more about the country and its complex, eventful, and sometimes tragic history. But I would also recommend a trip to Poland to anyone of any heritage...

[Tuesday, June 25] [Click on any photo for a bigger view] Today we traveled home. It was a very long day, just as the day(s) of our travel to Poland. It only took one calendar day because we left very early and gained back the 6 hour time difference. We had booked a car to take us to the airport, leaving the hotel at 4:30 AM to give us plenty of time to get to the airport and pass through security for our 7:30 AM flight. We had decided to go with the early flight so that we wouldn't have to drive back home from Newark in the dark after a long day of travel.  We set the alarm for 3:30, probably too conservative. Thankfully, we turned in early last night, because both of us had a fitful night's sleep. Travel anxiety. I got at most 4 hours of sleep.  The driver was already there for us when we went down to the lobby at 4:15. It was already light out, since Kraków is pretty far north of Pennsylvania and Poland is on the far western edge of its time zone. The driver loaded our stuf...

[Monday, June 24] [Click on any photo for a bigger view] I got up early on our last day in Poland. It was a beautiful morning. I wanted to run around the old town through Planty Park , the mostly tree-lined public park that follows the border of the old town of Kraków where the city walls once stood. The park circuit is about 4 kilometers (2.5 miles) if you include a run up the hill at Wawel Castle. I added a little more to make the run 3.5 miles. The park is filled with gardens, fountains, and sculptures, including monuments to Chopin, Copernicus, the Battle of Grunwald, Pope John Paul II, and numerous other figures from Polish history. It was early but not too early, so there were plenty of people out, mostly locals on their way to work. The tourists hadn't really come out yet. I snapped a few pictures (below) of some of the fountains and statuary. When I got back to the square by our hotel, I had to examine the large arched monument there. Artur Grottger , 19th century painter ...

[Sunday, June 23] [Click on any photo for a bigger view] After the Gate 1 tour, we had two days remaining in our stay in Poland. We had left these days open-ended, essentially unplanned, but had booked two extra nights in Kraków through Gate 1 in the same hotel room we'd had the previous nights using their group rate. Some possibilities for us were to rent a car and take a side trip to towns near  Kraków where some of my ancestors had come from, and to take a side trip to Zakopane, a town in the Tatra Mountains south of  Kraków. After some thought, we decided to nix the trip to visit my ancestral home towns. At this stage of the trip, it was a bit more hassling with car rental, driving, etc, than we wanted to do. I don't have any known relatives in these towns anymore. (In one case, that of my maternal grandfather who was born near Auschwitz, all the Poles in that area were removed by the Nazis in World War II!). And I just couldn't muster the interest in going to see small...