Poland 1991 #5of5

(Except Gdansk, Kraków, Oswiecim, Poznan, Szczecin, Warsaw, Wieliczka, Wroclaw.)

At one place a man was walking across a field, turning the crank on a box so that seed is “broadcast” evenly. Emmy is amazed at the way they farm in this part of Poland, but none of this is surprising to me. I did these same jobs, using a “broadcast box,” and both horses and tractors, long before I met her. No one felt sorry that I had to work so hard, either. (Daughter Linda says that when I tell how hard I worked on a farm, there was always six feet of snow, and it was twenty below zero.)

Just south of Kraków we saw a Texaco station under construction, the first familiar name we have seen on a station in Poland. It must rain a lot here, as the farmer’s fields contain wooden racks to hang the hay to dry, much like hanging laundry on a clothes line. We are in the south of Poland and are seeing the first mountains we have seen. On one country road, just outside a small town, we watched a funeral procession. First, children carrying a large cross, then the horse-drawn hearse led by a priest, followed by 30 to 40 people.

It has been raining steadily, but not too hard, as we drove towards Czechoslovakia, but we decided that without any Czechoslovakian money, we better stay in Poland tonight. Well, it took a long time to find a campground, but in the rain we did find a campground near Szczyrk, south of Bielsko-Biala. Would you believe that on our last night in Poland, this is the nicest and the lowest cost campsite we have had, this trip.

After dinner we tried to make a phone call to Daughter Linda, but the pay phone would not work (we never found one in Poland that would). There was no way they would use their office phone to dial that funny looking AT&T number that we “assured” them would connect us directly from Szczyrk to AT&T in the USA, at no charge to them. And how could we blame them. That “USA Direct” number contained a number sequence that no one in Poland, including telephone operators, would believe was a legal number. But it worked just fine when we dialed it from Henryk’s home telephone in Gdansk.

The Super Sam’s grocery store in Bielsko-Biala is about the largest we have visited in Poland. A loaf of bread, two rolls and a bottle of milk cost 68¢. Most any grocery item we have seen in this part of the world is available here, but the meat looked dreadful.