#wayoftheroad

Nowy Sącz... how did I get here?

The last time I posted we had arrived in Poland and settled in our lovely little bed and breakfast with a mountainside view, played a show to a nearly empty field of grass and after a good night's rest we were to leave early in the morning the next day, early meaning 9:30am, for Kraków. With us we had two passengers who needed to be dropped off on on the way. First we dumped my friend David J. off in a small city whose name roughly translated means golden-snout-town and our second passenger, Pastor D. we left behind a short while later in a nearby town whose name is not as much fun to translate. We were finally on our way to the historic capital of Europe for 2011.

Had I gone to sleep early the previous night I would have enjoyed the sights and sounds of the Polish countryside. I went to bed late and instead slept most of the way there on the triple seat in the back of our people mover. Although more comfortable than I expected it proved to be a poor substitute for a stationary bed and I kept on drifting out of bizzare dreams and fantasies the whole time.

Polish roads while present and usable are far from comfortable. Potholes and cranks aplenty reduce your average speed from what should be around 120 km/h to something like 60 or 75 km/h and a trip which would have taken 3 hours in Canada turns to 4.5 or 5 hours. By the time we got to Kraków we had been travelling for about that long and I was glad to be out of the van and even though it was raining I was glad to be on my feet and walking. 

We were running late for a lunch with the director of AVC, the organization that made our entire trip possible, but it was forgivable given the atmospheric conditions. We arrived at the restaurant in shorts, tshirts and wet flip-flops - little did we know it was the oldest and one of the most prestigious eateries in all of Kraków, if not Poland - the punk rocker in me was thrilled to be rocking flip-flops in a restaurant kings dine in. The food was amazing and the service was top notch. We ate, we drank and a good time was had by all. The director joked that it was compensation for the gastronomical atrocities we endured in the Czech Republic.

We left Kraków in a hurry. We were on our way to play a show that evening afterall and time was not our side. Arriving at the location we were late again but we got our instruments in tune and started to play. We were in the middle of a playground in a park. Kids swarmed the teetertotters, swings and climbers. Parents hovered about and some youth from the local church watched over a trampoline as the little tykes bounced around inside. The sky threatened us with a downpour but only a few drops here and there ever made it to the ground.

After the show Tomek, our bass player offered to take me and the guitar player, Dave, for the night to his inlaws' in Nowy Sącz where he was staying with his wife. Given our track record this was the wiser choice, who knows what kind of 1/2 star motel we could have ended up in that night. We slept well that night.

We had spent our last nite in the Czech republic and first thing in the morning we set off for the motherland - the sovereign Republic of Poland. Spending a week in a country where nobody spoke your language was enough. Communicating with hand gestures and parts of Polish and English thrown in was becoming tiring - I was glad to be going where people and places would have names I could understand!

We set off from Rousinov at around 10am and got to the Polish border sometime in the early afternoon; it could have been maybe 2pm. The last bits of the Czech Republic were finally fading and Polish words began to come up - 'sklep', 'autoserwis' and others were finally spelled with W's instead of V's. We crossed the Polish border almost routinely. The only thing guarding the border since the EU came into effect is the little white eagle on the sign marking it - no check point whatsoever. 

Once in Poland it was smooth sailing...well sort of. Even though I could finally read every single road sign the GPS took us to the wrong address. We took a wrong turn which lead us on a tour of the local mountain roads. We bounced along the so called highways - the equivalent of a back road in any other country - for another hour and finally reached what the GPS thought was the right address. We were a few kilometers off and with a little help from the locals got to the right place and just in time for dinner!