Hotel Turowka Wieliczka

... would be walking down the steps quickly and had to keep pace. Muriel was not happy about going down in the lift by herself but her companion did not want to use the lift. As my knees are never totally thrilled about steps, I said I would go down in the lift with her. The rest of the group disappeared and we walked to the lift. The lift is a small metal rattle trap. More about it later. We were down quickly ...

... the mines and in the three hours we were guided past sculptures of various mythological gods, fairy tales and public figures, the outstanding feature (& it's an impressive one) is the chapel. Measuring 12m high and 54m in deep, with ornate chandeliers, murals and an alter, all of which is made from salt...

... a night!! (though I've since found that I have to pay an extra 2 Euro 50 to shower and it's 25cent to use the toilet!!) and I've made better choices on the beer - purchasing some bottles of 6% for about 50 euro cents each... (I realised that my previous purchase of 1% beer only cost me 25 Euro cents). To get to the camp site you have to cross the main canal - which has a single swing-bridge ...

I have now been in Poland for 6 months. I still don't think it's really hit me. Nothing has hit me. Not even the jet lag. Oh I guess that one car almost hit me. I don't think that should count though. Oh look. Cold tea. I never drank tea in Canada and now it's a daily occurance. Ugh. I should not have just tasted it. Not so tasty. I used to hate tomatoes too but now I will purposely get them out of the fridge and put them on my open faced ...

... only covered 3km, or 1% of them. While they went down 350 meters underground to the ninth level, our tour would only go to the fourth floor or 130 meters down. We had a very funny Russian tour guide (its seems like comedy is more important than historical accuracy, which is more than fine with me!) and he showed us the amazing underground chapels, statues, pools and contraptions used to dig down so deep, so long ago. The tours were quite crammed with another ...

Ayant eu la grosse flemme de chercher la sortie de Gdansk on a decide de prendre le bus direction la frontiere lithuanienne : Suwalki Et on embarque a 6h30 dans le bus pour faire 400 bornes en 8 h qu'on a pas vu passer vu qu'on etaient affales sur plusieurs sieges chacun. Dimanche dans Suwalki, ca avait pas l'air tres accueillant mais la pizzeria ou on a repris des ...

... and not very friendly to cars parking there. Instead we programmed the Satnav for the nearest ATM and headed off. Conveniently it choose an ATM opposite a park with some street parking. Even better the park was a Wifi zone, so we got a quick e-mail check in. Making the assumption that free Wifi access was widespread in Poland, we thought we would quickly catch up on blog ...

So our family has a house outside of Wieliczka that is what I call the family house. It was built by my great grandfather in the 1800s and it's still standing strong. The front part of it is a barn while the back part has three rooms: one is a kitchen, the other is a huge room that used to be where the kids slept (8 of them), and the other room was for the parents. I remember this place from when I was little so being there was very wonderful! :) Besides two ...

... to the church where we met up with the rest of the fam. It was great to see everyone. So then mass and the marriage. hooray. they come out of the church and we throw money at them...kinda like the throwing of rice. these two ladies from my family who are from the aristocratic part of the family were there and they were so old school aristocrat dressed...like gloves, huge hats, fans, long umbrellas, the works...yeah i guess the aristocrats still work that way. Then ...

... reeds formed natural mazes that we had to navigate. At first we were almost all alone on the river. There was a couple up ahead who occasionally popped into view for a few bends and then disappeared again. Then suddenly we could hear shouts up ahead, and realized we were approaching a group of kayakers. They turned out to be a family of 4 kayaks who were mainly trying to tip each other, it seemed. As soon as we started trying to pass them, however, they all seemed to get more ...