Journey to Poland

We started out the morning by waking up at 7:30 AM...after a very restless sleep. I am still having a hard time falling asleep at night while adjusting to the time difference, even though I am exhausted. Kevin had a hard time falling asleep too, for the first time on our trip.

It was probably our nerves with traveling to a new country. If this didn't work out today, our trip would need to change immensely to get on track.

We had breakfast and checked out of our guest house at 8:40 AM. Next is the part that got scary. We were trying to make a train at Stockholm Central at 9:40 AM. The place we are staying at is 30 minutes from the desired train station AND the train was delayed because of signal failure. Prayers...began! Our train arrived at our station at 9...giving us 40 minutes to travel to Stockholm, run through the station to the SJ to activate our eurail passes, then run back through to find the right platform to our train to take us Stockholm Skavsta...an airport an hour out of Stockholm.

We arrived at Stockholm Central at 9:30...as promised, there was running! I was wearing flip flops, which sounded like gun shots every time I was running. I may...our may not...have taken them off to keep up with Kevin. At 9:33, we got to the place to activate our eurail, took a number, and waited "patiently" for someone to help us. Finally, a booth opened up.

The lady we came to seemed nervous and shaky. Maybe new. We quickly told her of our situation, and she doubted we could make the train. (We still had faith) She slowly and shakily filled out and stored our eurail passes. Finally done! She told us the platform the train was leaving from and we took off.

We ran back through the station, down a set of stairs and up another to the correct platform. At 9:39, we stepped on our train and into first class. Realizing we were in the wrong area, we calmly walked back to second class, relieved we had made the train.

There was another one at 11:40 we could have caught, but closer to our flight departure time than we were comfortable with. I prayed again in thanks that we made it.

While on the train, we were healed by a maybe insane...Maybe spiritually connected...older Swedish lady. She loved taking to Kevin as he knew Swedish. She later had to move as she was sitting in a place that animal owners had to sit, as a dog owner stepped on board. I was grateful to see a dog, yet it made me miss Zelda immensely, almost to tears. I did get to pet a dog yesterday on a train! It was very heart warming! :-)

Finally we got to our airport after taking a bus. We waited for our fight for the hours, which isn't so bad knowing that we made it there with plenty of time. We got on our flight, which left promptly at 2:30.

There was a very loud bachelor party on the flight, as they announced a groom was getting married in Poland...the party got a little louder. The were speaking who knows what language. I thought I heard German, Kevin hard Swedish. Kevin said they are most likely immigrants to Sweden and learned rough Swedish. Anyways, we were still able to get about 15 minutes of sleep.

We landed in Poland around 4 pm and caught a bus to Warsaw. Warsaw has cool buildings, but we had no time to explore.

We got to the Warsaw central train station and realized very quickly that not very many people know English. Like NO ENGLISH! Let's just say our train ticket buying involved a lot of hand gestures, body motions, and pointing. You can imagine Kevin dancing as we talked to the ticket lady. Also, we went through the ticket line twice....waiting 20 minutes for tickets each time. Apparently they don't take cards in Poland. The first lady pointed vigorously at a sign at her ticket box that was in only polish. We figured it said no card because she was pointing and shaking her head no. Anyways, we got cash...because she was NOT taking our card even though they had a card machine sitting right there.

The second time around we got out train ticket...40 minutes later. Luckily we planned for this. We got dinner from McDonald's...something familiar and easy to order. The high school looking girl looked surprised and excited that we were speaking English to her. She obviously listened in school, because she spoke English back...very well! We were so happy to FINALLY have an English speaker.

We caught our train at 6:30 PM. It was a very long train with lots of unexpected stops. It lasted an hour over the time it was supposed to get to Krakow, but we made it here a little after 11 PM. We walked through the old town of Krakow for about 20 minutes to get to our hostel. We checked in to our place and found out that a pipe broke in our double bed room. We are sleeping on bunk beds tonight with no ac. BUT we made it safely and that's all that matters. Tomorrow I knock something off my bucket list and it will all be worth it!

I love my husband very much! He has been so positive and supportive this whole time, despite his newly blistered feet. I am a very lucky woman!!

Ta ta for now.