Our Last Full Day in Poland

Today (Thursday) was our seventh day biking in Poland, and our last full day here since tomorrow's ride will take us into Lithuania. As the country on our trip so far that's differed the most from home, it's been the most interesting. We've seen more buildings, cars, and roads in poor repair than in the Western European countries we'd been through prior to reaching Poland, but we also saw wonderful villages and towns and beautiful countryside. We could barely communicate with people, but found them to be very gracious and helpful when they knew what we were seeking. We couldn't read menus very well, but managed to eat plenty of delicious food, including Polish specialties such as pierogis, kielbasa, and goulash.

Poland was far less bikable than England, Belgium, Holland, and Germany, with most roads lacking shoulders and bike lanes, and pavement often in mediocre-to-poor condition, but once we learned how to avoid the very busy roads the cycling was generally very pleasant. Furthermore, even though we had been warned that Polish drivers are reckless, their behavior towards us was uniformly wonderful, with all cars and trucks giving us wide berth whenever possible as they passed us.

Tomorrow, we're in for a new set of unknowns when we enter Lithuania: language, roads, food, ...

Here are a few pictures from our ride today:

Cleaning out the gears before starting out today

An outdoor market

Entering a walled city

One of numerous lakes we saw today

King and Queen for a Day

We had a wonderful, though hilly, 69 mile ride today (Wednesday) from Ostroda to Reszel, Poland. Our original itinerary for today called for a 63 mile ride from Ostroda to a different destination, but we re-routed ourselves a few days ago to avoid major, overly busy highways. The re-routing had a double benefit. First, we were on quiet (& well-paved) roads all day today, traveling in the countryside and through several beautiful small towns. Second, we re-booked ourselves into a spectacular castle converted into a four-star hotel (foregoing the cost of the room that we had originally booked for tonight). The hotel, Zamek Reszel Kreativ Hotel, has been rated one of the top ten castle hotels in the world by Gayot.com (a site that rates restaurants and hotels, and describes itself as "the guide to the good life"). We have a spacious brick-lined room, reached by climbing up one flight of a windy castle staircase and overlooking a courtyard.

When we planned our itinerary several months ago, we selected destination towns about 55-60 miles apart that had lodging places, and then reserved a room at what appeared to be the best hotel in each town. "Best" can be highly variable, especially when staying in small towns. Most of our hotels have been quite nice (though none as special as today's), some have been adequate, and a few barely passable. Breakfasts are usually included, but these too vary widely in quality and selection. One Polish hotel even offered only instant coffee as part of its included breakfast, and charged extra for real coffee (which we purchased). Some hotels, especially in Germany, had no one onsite but left a key for us and a phone number to call if we had problems. The one constant, regardless of the hotel quality or location, is that all offer wireless internet (usually free).

Beautiful countryside along our route today

Rush hour in a small Polish town

Arriving at our castle hotel

Crossing the moat bridge to the castle

Our hotel room

View of the castle courtyard from our room

Another Day of Finger-Pointing

Communicating with people in hotels, restaurants, and stores has been a problem for us in Poland, since very few people speak English, French, or German (the languages in which we can communicate). We downloaded a list of common Polish words to one of our phones, but it's been of limited use, and although we have the phone app Google Translate it's been of no real value since it requires internet access (which we only have when we're in our hotel rooms). So we generally get by via pointing and gesturing. In stores we point at the items we want to buy and in restaurants we point at the menu items we want to order. If we're hunting for a restaurant, we stop someone on the street and make gestures of eating until they realize what we're seeking. Fortunately, we know the word for "toilet", so we don't have to use gestures when we're hunting for bathroom facilities.

Today's ride, 68 miles from  Grudziadz to Ostroda, was the most challenging of our European trip to this point. The route was moderately hilly and the winds were at least partially in our face all day. But the most difficult aspect was the condition of the road surfaces. Some of the roads had rutted, cracked pavement, which makes riding uncomfortable and slow. Furthermore, even though we try to avoid dirt roads, we hit several such roads today, some of which were so sandy as to be unridable, requiring us to walk our bikes. We also found ourselves on a dirt trail through the woods for about a one mile stretch. All of this resulted in today being the first in which our average speed for the day was below 10 mph.

Despite the above, we've been impressed during our 4 days in Poland at how much work is being done to improve and widen roads. Road crews are out everywhere. Poland is clearly attempting to make up for several "lost" decades.

A great road today: good surface, wonderful surroundings

Chopped up, rutted pavement

Sandy, unbikable road

A trail through the woods on our route

Road work, a common sight in Poland

Fortunately, it's a cow, not a bull

Fun ahead, not left or right (an in-joke)

The Toilet Paper National Prosperity Index

The Economist Magazine's Big Mac Index (http://www.economist.com/markets/bigmac/about.cfm) uses a common consumer product in a semi-serious way to yield economically relevant information -- measuring the purchasing power parity between currencies. It's been our observation that another common consumer product, toilet paper, yields a different type of economic information: a gauge of a country's prosperity. In the late 1960's and early 1970's, when each of us travelled in Western Europe (mainly France, Germany, & England), we were struck by how rough and unabsorbent (sandpaper-like) the toilet paper was in comparison to that in our native Canada & US. Many other items, such as cars, buildings, and roads, also indicated a prosperity level below that of our home countries. Now, as Western European countries have caught up to North America in apparent standard of living, our bottoms get the same pampering in these countries as they do at home. In Poland, on the other hand, the current state of cars, buildings, roads, etc. feels reminiscent of what Western Europe was like ~40 years ago. Perhaps not coincidentally, almost all the toilet paper we've used in Poland is the same crappy stuff (forgive the pun) that we found in Western Europe ~40 years ago. Maybe someone will write an economics PhD dissertation on the correlation between toilet paper quality and GDP per capita.

Five miles into our 68 mile ride today, we passed through the town of Potulice. This Polish town was the site of an unusual Nazi concentration camp during WWII. Based on the bizarre Nazi racial theories, the Germans kidnapped many thousands of Polish children who were determined to have "Aryan" characteristics, and sent them to the Potulice Camp to undergo a Nazi experiment in forced "Germanization". The conditions in the camp, however, were so brutal that most of the children died. [As an aside, while it's not difficult to speculate on what genetic or other causes might lead to psychosis in an individual, it's quite amazing that an entire nation can become temporarily psychotic. Nazi Germany was hardly the first such example in history of temporary national psychosis, and almost certainly won't be the last].

The towns and countryside in Poland are quite strikingly different from those of Western Europe, so we have put a link on the right side of this blog to an album of pictures from our ride through Poland so far. This contains a few pictures that have already appeared on the blog, but also has many more.

A bike accident that happened shortly before we got there. It indicates why we have to be vigilant about watching cars approaching us from behind and in front of us

Carol taking advantage of free wireless internet on the walking street in the middle of Chelmno, Poland

A lunch stop you can bank on

Re-Routing Onto Quieter Roads

Several months prior to leaving on our bike trip, we planned our itinerary in detail. This included not only reserving all of our hotels, but also choosing all roads that we intended to bike along. We did the routing on a computer, using a mapping program (Mapsource) and a computerized map of every road in Europe, and then transferred the route to GPS units that attach to our handlebars. Since we had never cycled in Eastern Europe, we had to make educated guesses about how bikable various roads would be.

On our ride yesterday (Friday), our first full day in Poland, we found that the type of highway that we had chosen for most of our routing in this country is not well suited to biking, as we had a tense day on heavily trafficked roads with no shoulders and cars and trucks passing us at high speeds. Because of that, last night we revamped our route for today, choosing smaller roads (though this increased the length of the route from 57 to 67 miles). As a result, we had a very enjoyable ride today, on fairly small roads with relatively few cars and trucks. We are now in our hotel room, revising the routes for the next several days, a process that will involve at least one hotel change.

Remapping our route on computer & transferring to GPS

Quiet road in the countryside, as a result of re-routing

Gate to a walled town on route

Cycling through a small village

Mid-morning break at a store selling candy and soda

The back patio of our destination hotel, decorated for a wedding that will begin tonight and go on for two days (the Polish wedding tradition, we're told)

A Challenging Day Biking in Poland

Our ride today was our first in Poland, and the road conditions were far and away the most unsuited for cycling on our European trip so far. Prior to today, almost all of the roads we cycled on have had bike lanes or good shoulders. Today, few of our roads had these features, so we found ourselves on busy two-lane roads (one lane in each direction) with cars and trucks whizzing by at high speed. They all gave us good clearance, but it was unsettling nonetheless. Furthermore, when we passed through towns the road surface was often very rough cobblestones or worse.

On a broader note than just the roads, the region we traveled through today was in far worse condition than we've seen heretofore. While we noticed a significant drop in living conditions from West to East Germany, the worsening from East Germany to Poland was even greater (at least in the northeastern part of Poland, where we were today). Many, probably most, of the buildings we saw were old and very rundown.

Fortunately, our destination town of Strzelce Krajenskie is quite picturesque (though moderately rundown). It is surrounded by an intact wall from the 14th century, has an impressive church from the same time period, and has a well-kept main square in its center. Its sole restaurant, a small pizza joint, was where we had dinner.

Sharing the road with cars and trucks

One of many building in very poor repair that we saw today

Strzelce Krajenskie's main square

Part of the wall around Strzelce Krajenskie

The 14th century Gothic church

Into Poland (Barely)

We left Berlin today (Thursday) on a 57 mile ride. At mile 56.5, we crossed into Poland, where we'll be for the next 8 days. There were two notable events during our ride:

Carol took a spill while riding and dislocated her fifth finger proximal interphalangeal joint (the joint closer to the wrist on the pinky, for non-medical readers). We immediately returned it to normal position, bought medical tape in the next town, and used the tape to make a splint holding the finger in normal position. Carol will keep the splint in place for the next few days, and should emerge with no problems.

On highway B1 (the German road we did most of our biking on today) in the countryside a few miles from the border with Poland, we saw several prostitutes standing at various points along the road. We've never before seen hookers beckoning drivers on a highway, but looking it up online when we reached our hotel we learned that it's a problem that the German authorities are trying to eliminate (http://www.thelocal.de/society/20090908-21777.html). The women apparently come from Eastern European countries, mainly from Ukraine, Bulgaria, and Romania, and work in the Germany near the Polish border.

Cycling out of Berlin

A nice German town on our route

Hookers on the highway in Germany, in the countryside near the border with Poland

This is what Carol's pinky looked like after a spill. (It's not Carol's finger, but a picture we found on the web of a dislocated pinky after a bike accident, looking precisely the same as Carol's finger. We returned Carol's finger to normal position quickly, not wanting to delay to get a picture.)

Carol's finger after immobilizing it with medical tape

At the border, entering Poland

One of our first sights in Poland

About to Head Off Into the Unknown

Today we toured Berlin on foot, walking several miles. We visited the Reichstag (the home of the German legislature from 1894 to 1933 and again since 1999), the Brandenburg Gate (one of the main symbols of Berlin; the only remaining gate of a series through which Berlin was once entered), the Fernsehturm (the TV tower, a major Berlin landmark that, at 368 meters high, is among the tallest structures in the world), and many sites in between.

Tomorrow (Thursday) morning, we leave Berlin on a 57 mile ride that ends in Poland. We'll be spending the following 8 days in the Polish countryside, well north of the major cities such as Warsaw and Cracow, followed by 3 days in Lithuania, 3 in Latvia, 4 in Estonia, and 3 in Russia. In many ways, this will be heading off into the unknown for us. We have no clear idea what the roads will be like for cycling – whether there will be bike paths or road shoulders, what the quality of the road surface will be, and how bike-friendly drivers will be. We don't know how well we'll be able to communicate in order to get our basic needs met, since we don't speak the languages and have no idea whether we'll find people who know any English. We have little idea about personal safety and risk of theft of our bikes or other belongings. Another uncertainty is whether we'll encounter mean dogs free to run onto the roads. The last of these is especially concerning to Peter, a long-time dog-fearer (and dog-hater), and is the reason that both of our bikes have holsters containing pepper spray. It all makes for quite an adventure!

The outdoor part of the Holocaust Memorial

Brandenburg Gate

Reichstag

The "New Synagogue" in Berlin: actually built in ~1860, then damaged by the Nazis and WWII bombing and reconstructed in the 1990's. The posts to protect the synagogue from car bombers (seen at the bottom of the photo), as well as police guards on the sidewalk and metal detector in the entrance, sadly show that defeat of the Nazis did not rid the world of people bent on murderous hate crimes.

The Berlin TV Tower, with an observation deck and restaurant more than halfway up

Our bird's-eye view of Berlin from the observation deck

A Day of Touring, Shopping, Data Encryption, etc., in Berlin

Today was our first non-biking day after 11 days of cycling. It may sound like a rest day, but it was anything but that.

Neither of us is much of a tourist, in the usual sense of that term. We see and learn a tremendous amount by biking through cities, towns, and the countryside, since this mode of travel is, unlike car travel, at a pace that really allows you to take in your surroundings. On the other hand, we rarely enter museums, castles, or the like. But Berlin is so rich in twentieth century history that we spent a good part of our day being conventional tourists, visiting Checkpoint Charlie, remnants of the Berlin Wall, the Jewish Museum, and an outdoor exhibit on propaganda and terror in Berlin from 1933-1945. Berlin has done an excellent job of preserving and displaying information about the horrors that emanated from it during the past hundred years, including Naziism, the Holocaust, and Communist misrule.

Besides being tourists, we accomplished a number of tasks in preparation for the rest of our bike trip, including replenishing our candy and cookie supply and hand-washing our clothes in our hotel room. We also went to a bike repair shop to have our chains and tires checked out. Fortunately, our bikes got a clean bill of health.

Another important activity we undertook was to preserve and secure our computer data. We are carrying our laptops and have been doing a considerable amount of work on our trip. Besides keeping up to date on emails, one of our work-related activities has involved creating or updating Powerpoint presentations, which are large in size (~250MB each) because they contain multiple ultrasound images and videos. In preparing for our trip, we were concerned about losing the products of our labors on route, either because of computer failure – they bump around as we cycle, especially over cobblestones – or theft. The potential solution of storing our work on the "cloud" doesn't work, since the large file size means that each presentation takes impractically long to upload. So we brought along four 16GB USB flash drives to mail back home at various times with our latest work efforts. We just encrypted one of these drives and copied our new files to it, and will be mailing the drive home to ourselves tomorrow.

"Checkpoint Charlie": A reminder of the days when this was the only way to travel between East & West Berlin

Preserved sign from the days when Berlin was a divided city

A preserved section of the old, hated Berlin Wall

Entrance to an outdoor exhibit

Jewish Museum (an aerial view; not taken by us)

Our laundry drying in the bathroom of our hotel room