It had been raining so hard over night in Krakow that we were woken up on multiple occasions. We were very pleased though when we got up that it seemed to have dried out. We needed a dry journey after the previous wet awful one. After slowly getting ready, enjoying the flat for a little bit long we packed up and were on the road at 10am.
It was a pleasant ride and didn't take too long to get out of the city. We were very quickly into residential houses, farms and fields. The initial part of the journey took us down lots of small country roads, with good views over the rolling hils and past lots of tiny tractors, chickens and people ploughing their fields. Surprisingly, we found a lot of modern new houses, as well as a lot of infrastructure of the roads being updated, Poland is definitley investing in its country and seems to be doing well. There were also several dogs just wandering around, occasionally on the road so we had to keep an eye out for them. The majority of the drive was dry but very windy, especially when the fields opened up. However as we pulled up at our lunch lake spot it started to rain and hail. There was a little covered picnic bench though so we took cover under there eating our pack up. Once we were done we took advantage of the shower ending to waddle slowly around the lake to stretch out a bit and to kill some time before we could check into our guesthouse only a few minutes away. We had another quick stop on the way to the guesthouse at a viewpoint across the fields which was nice enough but the clouds kept threatening rain so we got on the road again quite quick.
We found our guesthouse- Agryostakana Kataranza?? situated in a small town on the edge of a forested national park. This was a nice modern building and we had a decent room with a small kitchenette and another lovely modern bathroom. As the sun was now shining- it really couldn't decide what weather it wanted to be- we went out for a walk just to get our bearings. There wasn't too much to see. Our guesthouse was on the main road of the village, as we walked up there were a couple of restaurants, a bar all shut as it wasn't the season and the only shop open was a small man selling ice cream. That was okay for us though as we had just picked here as a mid point to break up the journey to Warsaw. We didn't feel particularly up for a hike in the forest so instead walked along the dusty roads to a small supermarket where we found drinks and snacks. We had a very productive afternoon after that working on videos and blogs, call parents before having pot noodle dinner and watching some shows.
Being in the middle of nowhere and out of season we thought our guesthouse would be quiet. We were wrong and we had some noisy neighbours, thankfully not too late. The weather forecast for the morning was lots of rain so we decided to wait it out until we needed to check out at 10 am to see if it got any better. It did but we realised we had other issues. Due to it being busier there were several cars now parked in our way of getting out on the shallow outside gravel. This meant trying to reverse and narrowly turn on deep gravel to try and get around the cars. This did not go well and after lots of effort of trying to pull the bike back and do minute turns we ended up wedged in the gravel and we were only . We were also covered in mud where we were trying to pull muddy gravel out from under the bike and even the holes we were now in. I ended up having to go around knocking on various guests doors in the end to get them to try and move their cars so that we could try to just move forward. We realised once they had moved their cars though that we still weren't able to move anywhere. A couple of lovely polish ladies then set about helping us and a team effort of pulling and finding boards to drive onto and an hour later we had made it out of the carpark! It wasn't raining though so that was one thing.
After getting our breath back (we were horrendously sweaty in all our layers!) we actually set off for warsaw. The drive itself was pleasant enough. About 1 hr 15 after setting off we pulled in at a McDonalds as we had got very cold from the wind now freezing our sweaty layers- glamourous are these bike trips! Coffees and a chicken box for lunch and we felt ready to hit the road again. This was hampered again though as we set off around the corner to get fuel and our bike was making an awful clunking/crunching noise. We managed to get fuel and then after 15 minutes of trying to clean out the wheel incase it was dirt and Dave driving it around a bit it seemed to have sorted itself out a bit and we got on with the journey. The drive after this was a gorgeous hour through some forests. A quick stretch later and we had another hour to Warsaw. The sun was out but it was incredibly windy so we were very glad when we arrived in Warsaw at our hostel, a lot later than intially planned but at least we managed to get here. There were definitely parts throughout the day that didn't feel like we were going to make it but we did!
We shall be exploring Warsaw in the next blog.
Thanks
Alex
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