That day finally came. We had breakfast one last time in Zakopane and then packed up to return to Krakow. I’m not ready to return to normal life yet. Vacation has been exciting and wonderful. I’ve seen so much.
We could see the front of the hotel from our windows. So we sat in the living room reading until the van arrived to carry us north to the hotel by the airport. I didn’t have any plans made for how we would spend the afternoon. I just knew we would be near the airport for our early departure.
Our driver pulled into the driveway and got turned around before I knew he was there. We gathered up our stuff and locked up the room. Rich went on down to meet the guy. I dropped off the key and to say good-bye. I said, “Dziekuka,” which is thank you in Polish.
Outside, our driver, David, was putting the first of the suitcases into the van. This is not the same David as our trip to Rudy Rysie. My suitcase weighed a ton today. I’m not sure why. I only added a couple of things. Of course, I had most of the dirty clothes in my bag. He put it into the van without much trouble, so I didn’t have to be too embarrassed.
David explained that he was going to take the country roads back up to Krakow. There was a lot of construction on the main road. We weren’t in a big hurry so seeing more of the countryside was OK with us. David lived on the southside of Krakow and said he usually did the run from Zakopane to Krakow. He had a head start anyway by being on that side of town.
We went through some beautiful little villages. David explained that one of the villages was probably the oldest in this area. All of the homes were wood log structures. You could easily see that the houses were much older than the ones around them. The houses and the barns are one structure here as well.
We left the mountains for a valley for a bit before we started to climb back up the other side. There were meadows with grazing cows. Here the cows have a chain attached to their neck with a weight on the other end of the chain. David said this was to discourage the cows from wandering away. Cows tend to be lazy and I image pulling the weight would make them think twice about moving too much.
We made it into Krakow in good time. It only took us an hour and 40 minutes from Zakopane. I was worried about traffic and the horror stories of 6 hours traffic jams. I guess I didn’t have to worry after all. As we came up from the south and headed to the airport, we saw the monastery on the mountain. We had seen this while touring Kosciuszko’s Mound earlier with Marcin and Aneta. We had a good idea of where we were in relationship to downtown.
I had made reservations at the Hilton Garden Inn by the airport. I didn’t realize it was directly across from the terminal building. So much for having to figure out how to get there. We could just walk across the street! We said good-bye to David and went in to register.
This morning, Rich was starting to have some trouble with his back. By the time we got to our hotel by the airport, he was really having trouble. We got upstairs to our room and he sat down. That was a mistake. After a bit, he was able to get up and take Ibuprofen. Then he crawled into bed to stretch out and wait for it to take effect. While he slept, I got checked into our flight, boarding passes printed, and toured around the hotel a bit. It’s a pretty basic hotel with few amenities. It’s just for overnight and then we move on to Frankfurt.
Later, Rich got up and we walked along the road by the terminal to see where we go for departures in the morning. We needed to be over at the terminal by 8:30 in the morning to check bags and figure out where our plane was. That will seem pretty early for us after vacationing all this time.
Tomorrow, we fly into Frankfurt. We’ll have the afternoon and evening to go downtown and look around. I figure we’ll eat dinner down there and be back at the hotel to sleep. Our flight leaves later in the day on Wednesday. At least we won’t be rushing all over the place to catch planes and get through securit