September 26, 2014
To Smardzewice
Last night we studied the maps and all our navigation devices carefully and worked out our route for the day. We set off with great confidence feeling we needed to refer to nothing, we knew it all! Not a good idea we went horribly off route not that it was really a bad thing, we just added a lot more kilometres to our journey.
We were soon once again in remote rural areas. It looks so different from the, at times, rather garish new houses and perfect fences (yes I will tell you about fences some time) of the affluent areas. Everything is much more humble and in many ways more in keeping with the landscape. There seem to be bus routes allover the place as I suspect there are few cars - though there are a number of rather basic old bikes. To us it seemed that the people, as we have experienced all over Poland, have a wonderful generosity of spirit. As those of you who have been to St Cuthbert's would recognise they seem to be fulfilling the school motto. As always however there are those that have fallen through the cracks. The problem is that these cracks are full to overflowing with Vodka. They are mostly, but not always, men usually in their forties or fifties I would say, with shambling gait and empty eyes.
Ken and I are setting up a chain of Coffee stops all over rural Poland. It works like this. In a small hamlet we recognise a shop. Ken goes in and asks do they have Kava (coffee). They say no, he smiles and talks a bit in a language they don't understand and comes out to the bikes. Almost immediately he is followed out by a smiling woman who says what we presume to mean that she can make us Kava and shows us a jar of coffee. Today's coffee stop was one of the best - two lovely ladies and a man (who was very excited because he had relatives in Australia). They brought out chairs and made Slovakian style coffee then they brought us cake. Even Steve Miller would have waxed lyrical about this cake. It had a softish chocolaty base, the top was a cream colour the bottom part of which was very soft with a lemon flavour and the top bit spongey - it didn't look fantastic but it tasted amazing. Paying is always difficult as they don't want to charge us but we manage to get around that. An interesting thing about these shops is that they have vans attached which are set up like mobile shops and they drive around the little hamlets peeping their horns and stopping and the residents come out to buy - no supermarkets here. One of our ladies set out shortly after we left so it was fun leap frogging down the road with her and we always got a very special beep on the horn from her! We are so fortunate to be experiencing this - I am sure that it is a way of living that will be gone in a few years. And yes we did see horses working the fields again today.
As you can imagine I have found finding hotels a nightmare so for a complete contrast to what we have experienced we are staying at a massive Conference Hotel near a large dam on the PilIca There are serious looking people carrying briefcases and sitting in darkened rooms and as we arrived a large tour bus arrived full of people carrying german type walking sticks encased in plastic bags. Looking out the window now I see the plastic has been discarded and they are wandering about the forest dragging the walking sticks behind them.
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Today's ride: 61 km (38 miles)
Total: 2,871 km (1,783 miles)
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