Eccentric roadside restaurant

Somewhere between Czestochowa and Piotrków Tryb. (on the way to Warsaw) you will notice an old plane parked in a field. Wojtek and I, returning from a business trip, decided to stop there for a short while to break up the very long return trip to Bielsko-Biała. The trip was actually a good test run for the first leg of our forthcoming holiday because Bielsko-Biała is almost exactly half way between Warsaw and Vienna so I drove the same distance. Not as bad as I thought it would be and if we leave home at 07:30 we should arrive Vienna at about 19:00 including a few stops.

Anyway, here’s a short film entitled “Freedom of expression (& żurek)”

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I never promised you a rose garden….

But I can bring you a rainbow!

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Two rainbows spotted on the way back from Bielsko-Biała

Apologies – Butterfly video removed due unsatisfactory amount of background noise! (and a lot of pressure from the associate editor)

Summer holiday – the great adventure

This summer we decided not to book the usual 2-weeks-by-the-sea package tour via TUI, ITAKA or whoever and to try something different. We’re not great beach-lovers anyway. Last year we were right on a good beach and we probably stepped on it all of three times in two weeks. We prefer seeing the sights, reading in the bar/cafe or playing in the pool. We’re also a little tired of the whole package tour experience, the sheep-like travel, the iffy hotels. So it was that we decided to take three weeks instead of two and just jump in the car, head south and see what happens.

This was all well and good until we started to get a little nervous about whether we would find decent places to stay given the fact that we’re going in August, the height of the season. We talked of buying a tent, just in case, or sleeping in the car. We started to convince ourselves that sleazy roadside motels have a certain attraction and not all of them are run by the family, Bates. We even went as far as searching Amazon.co.uk for a book called “Great places to stay in various countries south of Poland that won’t be fully booked in August and cost between €100-150 per night”. No luck with that one.

It was at this point that I took to the internet (where would we be without it?) and started trying to organize the trip a little. My best friend was the site TripAdvisor.com, which may have its faults but I have found to be pretty reliable at pointing me in the right direction as regards places to stay. The other tools used were Google maps to plan the route and ViaMichellin to give me an idea of how long it would take to get from A to B. These three combined with trips to numerous hotel websites and plenty of emails inquiring about availability of rooms have allowed me, only one month before we leave, to have confirmed reservations for 17 nights. I’ve been surprised actually that every one of our first choices have been available apart from Milan because the hotel is closed in August. In fact Milan hotels generally are pants at responding to mails. They obviously don’t need the business. Milan may end up as one of those “mystery nights” at this rate, along with the two nights on the way home which I’m leaving open as I’m not sure how fast we will want to do the return trip.

So, on the off-chance that a dear reader may have some tips to pass on, here is the list of places we’ll be staying in and visiting sometime next month:

Staying in:

• Vienna
• Bad Aussee (Grundlsee), Austria
• Venice
• Milan
• Bellagio
• Lucca
• San Gimignano
• Bratislava (perhaps on the way home)

Also visiting:

• Salzburg
• Großglockner alpine road
• Lake Como generally (Clooney’s place for tea, of course)
• Pisa
• Florence
• Siena
• Montalcino
• Montepulciano
• Other Italian sounding places in Tuscany

It could be fun. I think there’s enough interest for Zosia and we’ve kept the horrid driving days down to perhaps 3 in the whole holiday. Going to be a terrible lot of photos and videos to process when we get back!

The great frog hunt!

Toads possibly?

For a while now we have been serenaded regularly and loudly by what we assume to be either frogs or toads living somewhere around the lake. This evening we decided to go look for them, which was very good of M because she has what one might call an “irrational” fear of frogs. Unfortunately, they were well hidden somewhere around the border of the lake in the reeds so we were not able to get any shots of them but we did get the sound they make just in case anyone is able to identify frogs/toads by their call?

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This is just a short clip because they could obviously smell/hear/see us and were chatting for only a very short time and at significantly less volume than normal.

Finally, here’s the very brave M trying to de-sensitise herself from amphibic things by picking up the only one that crossed our path, a tiny little froglett that must have been born yesterday!

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Poppies

We were early for the family birthday party today, Antoni is 3 years old, so we drove around the fields behind Łomianki for a while. I spotted this field of poppies and thought it worth another video experiment.

So, here’s something nice and calm for a Sunday evening – “Poppies Under a Stormy Sky”

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This short clip came out of the camera as a 50 Mb .m2ts file which was then converted into a 3Mb file .wmv file. I’ve now turned down the quality setting so we’ll see what the next ones look like.