October 7, 2023

Dateline – Krakow, Poland

It’s been a rather uncomfortable day, at best and I am nodding off like crazy so this travel diary may be relatively brief. Suffice it to say that I have successfully made it back across the pond, this time to Krakow, Poland where I am ensconced at the Sheraton Grand hotel, just across the street from the Vistula River in the old town section where the Wawel Castle dominates the skyline outside of my window. Usually, when I am booked into fancy hotels, I have a lovely view of the parking lot or the construction site next door. This time, however, it’s brick towers with verdigris copper cupola roofs.

It was just over a 24 hour process to get here. I was able to sleep in some on Friday morning (but was too excited to take full advantage of the opportunity) and finished my packing, loading myself into a Birmingham airport bound Uber. I have this rule of being a few hours early for international flights just in case something goes horribly wrong like I’ve left my passport on the dining room table so I have time to cope. Of course, nothing went wrong and at 11 AM, Birmingham Shuttlesworth airport was hardly a hotbed of major activity. The tour company had me booked on United, an airline I haven’t flown since moving away from the West coast some 25 years ago. This meant, instead of a brief hop to Atlanta to catch the transatlantic flight, a two hour flight the wrong direction Houston where I ended up about 550 miles further away from Europe than I had started the day. The flight was uneventful, other than parking for twenty minutes on the tarmac in Birmingham where they did some sort of hard reset on the avionics by turning the plane off and back on again. Not the sort of thing that inspires confidence.

The long flight, from Houston to Munich, was about eleven hours. Enough time for me to watch all three theatrical cuts of The Lord of the Rings Movies with time to spare. Actually watch is the wrong verb. Doze through is more accurate. I managed to miss the entire battle of Helm’s Deep and the passage through the caves of the dead amongst other things. I was off the plane in Munich around 9:45 AM local time. (My internal clock was set seven hours earlier). My flight to Krakow was not until 3:30 PM. Apparently the MUC/KRK run isn’t very popular and that was pretty much the only choice. Not enough time to leave the airport and venture into the city in these post 9/11 days so a lot of sitting in the really uncomfortable hard plastic chairs that populate the Lufthansa terminal departure lounges. I had hoped, as it is Oktoberfest, that there might be an oom-pah band around or someplace to purchase lederhosen and a Tyrolean hat, but I was sadly disappointed.

The hours dragged by, eventually, the Krakow flight was called, and back up in the air for a few more hours. Then collect the luggage at John Paul II International Airport in Krakow, clear customs and find the driver who would take me into town. All went smoothly and I walked into the door of my hotel room around 6 pm local time, a bit over 24 hours after walking out the door of my condo. The luggage made it. The room is nice. The only major issue is I have to write these travel missives on my iPad rather than my laptop as the latter broke yesterday just as I was getting to leave. The tip of the power cord broke off and stuck within the housing of the machine. I’m assuming it’s an easy repair but I had no time to deal with it before leaving. If anyone local to Birmingham has a suggestion on where to take it when I get back to get that fixed, I would be grateful. I’ve written pretty much all of my long posts since Tommy’s death (including the three books) on that machine and I don’t want to unceremoniously dump it quite yet.

I haven’t gotten much of a feel for Krakow yet. It was dusk when I arrived and drizzling (the weather is very Seattle at the moment) so I confined my orientation walk to the river promenade and finding somewhere to get a decent meal. I ended up at a Ukrainian restaurant. (Western Ukraine is not that far east of here) for a meal of some sort of meat dumplings with sour cream with ice cream crepes for dessert. Tomorrow I start exploring in earnest, I can’t say that I know a lot about the city or about Poland, my prior encounters being limited to having read ‘The Trumpeter of Krakow’ when I was nine or ten and enjoying it. (It’s a YA novel from the 20s, one of the first Newberry winners – I remember that it takes place in medieval Krakow, and that the hero is a boy who plays the trumpet in the tower and that the legend of the broken note is involved along with an alchemist and the philosopher’s stone but how the pieces all fit together, I cannot recall). It’s only like 3:30 in the afternoon Birmingham time but it’s 10:30 PM here so I am going to sign off and try to reset my internal clock.