July 4, 2010 - Hrubieszow to Wlodawa

Estimated Mileage: 70 miles
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Forget the Fourth of July, today was Stork Day for me.  They were everywhere!

Every town had a few dozen enormous stork nests.  Half the nests had a single stork, the others had a whole gang of them: 3, 4, 5 storks all crowded on top of electrical poles.  Whenever I passed one, I made a point of saying "Hey Gang!".  They responded with this ominous beak clacking.  There must have been several hundred along the way.

The whole day I skirted along the very eastern border of Poland, spying little bits of the Ukraine and Belorussia across the Bug River.

The riding, as it has been nearly everyday in Poland, was really wonderful.  The roads were mostly well-paved, the weather cooperated, and I only had two run-ins with vicious dogs.  The dog thing is beginning to really get to me.  Usually, it's just little dogs that chase me, and they don't worry me too much.  But today I ran into my first bicycle tourist on the road, and stopped to say hello.  Immediately, a really nasty looking black lab came snarling and running at me.  For a black lab to snarl and charge means it's a mean dog, since by default black labs are the most docile creatures on the planet.  So I took off and didn't get to have a conversation with the other lone bicycle tourist on the Poland/Ukraine border.

The day ended at Sobibor, the location of a death camp which saw a successful uprising in 1943.  Many of the prisoners escaped and spent the war fighting with the Polish Partisans or the Red Army.  There wasn't much left from the war, except this sign and some broken train tracks:

My hotel for the night was the Hotel Czar Polesie, a really nice place in the middle of Wlodawa.  Very highly recommended and run by one of the sweetest old couples you'll ever meet.