Off to Poland

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We're going to Poland, for almost three weeks. This is a trip we started planning 5 years ago. The original plan was to have a self-guided, month-long Central European tour in 2020, with visits to Berlin, Dresden, Vienna, Prague, and several cities in Poland. We had the trip sketched out, with days apportioned. The only thing remaining was to book travel and accommodations. Then COVID intervened. Europe wasn't ready for unfettered travel in 2021, and there was still enough uncertainty about 2022 in late 2021 that we planned a trip to the western US and Canada for 2022. You can read about our 2022 adventures here: https://m-and-vs-trip-west.blogspot.com. We decided to stay closer to home in 2023, but would take up travel planning that year. When we dusted off the 2020 plans in late '23, the prospect of filling in and booking the self-guided tour seemed a bit more daunting, especially in light of the experience we gained in '22. And a month seemed like it would be exhausting, (again, especially in light of the experience we gained in '22). So we decided to scale the trip back to Poland only. We'd been hearing good things about the guided tour company, Gate 1, so we decided to plan a hybrid tour: Book Gate 1 for a big chunk of the trip (11 days), and add on a few days on either end to cover parts of Poland not included in the Gate 1 excursion (and leave more time for unplanned days and relaxation).

Last night, we finished packing. Vicky made me an enormous muffuletta to space out across three meals as we travel. Today I drove to New Jersey. We made it through check-in. We fly through Frankfurt and arrive in Warsaw, Poland tomorrow afternoon. We’ll then hop a train for Olsztyn in northeastern Poland.

Muffuletta has marinated olives and vegetables in a scooped out loaf of bread…

…and lots of cold cuts!

Ready to go!

Meta post: Me writing this post…

Days 1 and 2

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