July 3, 2010 - Zamosc to Hrubieszow

Estimated Mileage: 45 miles
Trip Route Link
Photo Album Link

For a short 45 mile ride, I was sure a whiny little beeeeeeeeyatch the entire time.  Not very hilly, through truly wonderful cycling country.

My morale issues continued unabated, despite various attempts to cheer myself up.  Singing John Prine songs and making up rap lyrics to rhyme with "Krajabrozovy" helped for a couple of hours.  This was also going to be my last day of going east.  After today, it was going to be a north and west trip, instead of south and east.  It felt like a milestone.

I got to stay in the winner of last year's "Poland's Worst Hotel" reality contest.  When I arrived, it was clear that nobody had any time for me, since they were prepping for a wedding at the attached banquet hall.  I didn't have to pay for dinner, because they just served me from the wedding meal.  I holed up in my miserable room (it was only about $20 a night, so I can't complain too much), with a earplug in one ear and a headphone in the other, trying desperately to drown out the techo-Polish folk dancing going on about 100 feet  away.

Notice that there aren't any beds, just two couches converted into "beds".  I slept in the crevasse of the one near the window.

July 2, 2010 - Lublin to Zamosc

It was my first breakfast in 4 days without the pleasure of my mom and Marilyn's company and it left me feeling very alone.  All of sudden, without the pleasure of getting driven around and having tour guides and schedules, it was just me and the Chump Steamroller again, alone on the road.

In a fit of pique, I altered my plans again and decided to hit the road for Zamosc.  Everyone I had met who knew the area told me to go see Zamosc: that it was a beautiful town in a beautiful region.


On the way out of Lublin, I ran into a family of French bicycle tourists, doing an enormous 6-month jaunt around most of eastern Europe.  They got me smiling a little bit after all the feeling sorry for myself that I was doing that morning.

Morale started to be an issue for me that day.  I had lost a little bit of steam, and started to have thoughts like "How much would it be to change my ticket?" or "Should I take a train to Greece?"  Through sheer force of will, I shelved these thoughts, Corked It and pushed on with the day.

After a week of rest, the ride was a piece of cake.  However, my diet degraded entirely during my mom's visit and I could feel the pounds of kielbasa and pierogi slowly getting filtered through my pores, like vaseline through a cheesecloth.  Also, my bike continued with it's supremely annoying rear derailleur issues.  I set up shop in a town square and proceeded to spend an hour tinkering with bits of my bike I have no business monkeying around with.

I ended up fixing the problem by eliminating the index shifting and just using friction shifting.  If I had known I could do that, I would've done it two months ago.

Zamosc was indeed a gorgeous town.  It's one of the first completely planned villages, sprung out of the mind of a Renaissance artist and architect.  It was envisioned an enormous center of commerce, government and the military.  Because of this, it was encircled by some of the most daunting fortresses around.  It withstood the Swedish invasion of the 1600's (the only town to do so beside Gdansk and Czestochowa) and withstood the post-Napoleon Russian invasion of the 1800's for 9 MONTHS before finally succumbing due to the mass starvation in the town.

I entered the beautiful main market square after cleaning up and what did I find?

A freaking vintage motorcycle convention!  There were dozens of immaculately restored old bikes being ridden by various gearheads and mechanics.  Everybody had a smile, and I snatched a seat at a pizzeria close by the start of their ride.  They were starting their engines, one-by-one and heading off on some kind of group cruise.

I allocated some budget to the Morale Committee, in order to improve the spirits of the Expedition.  The Budget Committee lodged their usual complaints, but they were eventually shot down by the Large Handlebar Bag, who wanted another beer.  I seconded his motion.

Dear Gentle Reader

From June 25th to July 1st, I was in Krakow and then Lublin.  For most of that time I was with my mom and a close family friend, Marilyn.  We had a really great time and did way too many things for me to blog about without getting waaaay behind on the day to day trip reports.  I'm going to process some of the things we saw and did and write up a more detailed set of blogs about them.  In the meantime, I'm going to post the recent daily trip reports since then.

Until then, check out my photo albums of those days (they'll be captioned properly soon...)

June 25th - 29th: Krakow
June 29th- July 2: Lublin
Majdanek Camp

Holy Smokes....Lots Going On

I've been in Krakow and Lublin for the last 6 days and things have been amazing and emotional.

Krakow was incredible.  Filled with history, art and wonderful people.  Unbelievably vibrant and alive.

I've been in Lublin for 2 days and it's been a trip into recent history.  The story of what happened here during the war is beyond tragic, not just for the Jews, but for the entire town. 

But beyond the tragedy is a story of a renewal and rebirth.  There's new life everywhere, it seems: construction, industry, culture, commerce.

I've got a lot on my mind, and will try to communicate some of it in the coming days...

June 25, 2010 - Czajowice to Krakow

Estimated Mileage: 20 miles
Trip Route Link
Photo Album Link

June 24, 2010 - Wolbrom to Czajowice

Estimated Mileage: 25 miles only!
Trip Route Link
Photo Album Link

My trip went from care-free jaunt to a Shackleton-esque doomed journey that morning.  I had a number of things go wrong all of sudden.  Here's a list of some of the issues that popped up that morning:

• Serious nausea (could it be caused by the cottage cheese and kielbasa for breakfast?  Nah...)
• Chased by dogs three times
• Rear derailleur shifter breaking and higher gears starting to skip yet again
• Rain, rain, rain and worthless shoe covers
• Charlie horse in my left thigh
• Left my Leatherman tool on a park bench
• I forgot to give back the hotel key

I went through the various stages of anger, annoyance, self-loathing and anger again.  Then you know what I did with all these chumps?  I STEAMROLLED THEM!!!!

The most disconcerting of the problems was being chased by dogs.  This freaked me out considering I was completely vulnerable and could sustain a fairly serious injury if they either bit me or knocked me off my bike.  Luckily, I came up a defense solution: waving my tire pump at them.  I moved the pump to an easily accessible position in the Large Handlebar Bag, and felt much more secure knowing a weapon was at my disposal:

Every house that I passed for the first half of the day had a passel of barking dogs, usually fenced, but sometimes not.  Not very fun...

Here's me, struggling to remain positive despite the numerous woes that beset me that morning.

The day's route brought me into a park named Ojcowski.  It's a river gorge, with steep cliffs and rocks on either side and various ancient castles and churches lining the sides

It was a beautiful ride, but very, very wet.  The last bit of the day was spent in a 2 mile ascent out of the gorge and to the hotel.  After I was done climbing, I realized that I wasn't even tired or out of breath.  This made me reflect on how far I'd come on this trip, in terms of my physical ability to ride.  I just rode for 3 straight days, averaging 60 miles a day, through some not-so-easy terrain, and it barely phased me.  I'm proud of that...

June 23, 2010 - Czestochowa to Wolbrom

Estimated Mileage: 65 miles
Trip Route Link
Photo Album Link

Since my hotel was a bit out of the town, I passed through the center of Czestochowa to see the cathedral/pilgrimage site.  The first thing I noticed was an enormous street of trinket and bauble merchants selling piles of crap:

But instead of back-scratchers and shot glasses it was various religious icons and pictures of Pope John Paul II.  Heading to the cathedral, swarms of folks streamed into the square.  The back lawn was all set up for some kind of huge ceremony:

Riding out of Czestochowa was surprising easy.  There were labelled bike paths the entire way out, right next to the main highway out of town.  However, the path took me just next to a group of really grim looking Soviet-era slums with graffiti covering the bottom 6 feet of wall.  The scribbles were full of the symbol "HL", a number of swastikas and Jewish stars with some writing underneath.  I like to think that this was a Jewish gang in control of the slums; that "HL" stands for Hebrew League or Hasidic Lovers or something.  Anyway, it sent chills up my spine, and I was thankful that it was such an isolated incident and not something I saw anywhere else.

Things got a little hilly this day.  Nothing terribly difficult, but just constant up and downs.  But the real attraction of the day was the hilltop castle ruins that I saw everywhere during the day:

This area north/northwest of Krakow was the domain of the old Polish kings.  These castles are from the 13-15th century and dot the landscape.  The area is mostly hilly, with these much larger protrusions every few miles.  If you look close enough at them, odds there there's some kind of ruin on top of it:

This area is called the "Jurassic Cuesta" which is some kind of geological rock formation that I don't quite understand.  All I know is that it afforded me a beautiful lunchtime view on top of it:

The day was another one in the "Win" column.  It ended rather hilariously in Wolbrom.  The hotel I was staying at was hosting the 10th anniversary party of the founding of a company named "TRI Poland", which is a offshoot of a Japanese rubber factory.   Now, I've spent a year in Japan, attending various official company parties, so I feel I can say this without sounding like I'm stereotyping:  these parties are the most embarassingly trite and lame parties you can ever go to.  The kowtowing to the heads of the company, the strict entertainment schedules: it's all just awful.

The street was shut down, and I had a hard time getting past the cops to the reception desk, me being sweaty, fluorescent and generally run-down.  I look like a vagrant who just robbed a high-end camping store.  After some waving, pointing and smiling, I got through to be greeted by a lobby full of Poles wearing traditional garb as part of the night's festivities.  I holed up in my room and heard the blaring lounge singer belting out "Fever" and "Blue Moon" until about 10 PM.  Speeches were given, first in English, then in Polish then in Japanese, kind of like some bizarre Rosetta Stone of cheesy toasts.  A very funny night.