Doubilet-Benson Europe Bike Trip 2011: 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.