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Krakow Day 4 – Crazy Guys!

I needed to be sure how to pronounce the name of the city I was staying in. I was saying Krakov, but I had heard alternative pronunciations. Our guide Maciej said that the locals say Krakuf, Germans say Krak-ow, and the French say Krakova. So take your pick, but I’m sticking with Krakov!

Maciej picked us up at 10.30 in his 40-year-old black Trabant. Inside it’s about the same size as an old mini but is noisier and smellier. The petrol tank is under the bonnet, not a good substitute for an airbag. It went surprisingly fast for a 2-stroke 600cc air cooled engine, but since it was mostly made of East German glass fibre, it’s quite light. Our guide came from an outfit called Crazy Guys, and they give conducted tours around Nowa Huta, the new town built next to Krakow to house workers for the enormous steelworks that was a gift from Stalin. It was built from scratch for 100,000 people, providing much-needed homes in post-war Poland. Many people moved from thatched wood and mud cottages into centrally heated flats with inside toilets and electricity, I’m sure they were very grateful. The flats were built to a high standard and faced with sandstone, which is a bit grimy today but the town is still impressive.

Nowa Huta (which means New Mill) is laid out with wide avenues and green areas and is connected to the rest of Krakow by tram lines. The main square is named after Ronald Reagan, who is fondly remembered in Poland for funding the Solidarity trade union which was very strong in Nowa Huta. These days the steel mill is owned by Arcelor Mittal, and has 3,000 workers, down from 40.000 in its hay day.

Maciej took us into one of the flats which the Crazy Guys rent out to show to tourists. The flat has polished wooden floors, central heating and is reasonably spacious; but often there would be three generations squeezed into each flat. An unusual domestic accessory was the still in the bathroom for making vodka. Maciej put on an old black-and-white propaganda video about the construction of the city and gave us a vodka and pickle to put us in the mood. He was a very knowledgeable guide who gave us a great insight into life under Communism.

We went for lunch in a Milk Bar, which is a low-priced cafe for local people. I had some beetroot soup to start which was surprisingly sweet and tasty, and I followed that with some pork dumplings. After that hearty meal I was ready to go and make some steel! I loved the menu board with the little plastic letters in it. Four of us ate well for about 10 quid!

I loved the menu board with the little plastic letters in it, the Milk Bar look likem it hadn’t changed for 50 years! Four of us ate very well for about £10, what a bargain.

Milk Bar – you can anything you like from the menu

At the end of the tour we were dropped at the Barbican close by the Old Town and had a walk around some parts of it that we hadn’t seen so far. The Dorling Kindersley guidebook is brilliant for finding interesting streets that you wouldn’t come across if you were walking around randomly.

Julie (bless her) found a great bar called Banyaluka where all the drinks are 4 Zlotys (about 90 pence), so we had a shot, then a mulled wine, then a beer. It was a very relaxing bar.

Krakow Day 3 – Salt Mines

Getting to the Wieliszka Salt Mines took a bit of faffing about. To get there we needed to get the tram to the railway station, and at the tram stop, a young lady with perfect English told us to get the number 18. The Krakow Glowny station is joined onto a huge shopping centre and we had to hunt around the maze to find the ticket office and the correct platform.

After much faffing and a couple of minor domestics we found the right train and were soon heading out of the suburbs on a new and very comfortable train to the mine. The mine was one of the first UNESCO World Heritage sites, and the Polish people are very proud of it. Since the 13th century, the salt mined at Wieliczka has been a steady source of income to the Polish Crown, providing the King with a third of his income.

At 10.30 we entered the mine with Adrian, our English speaking guide. He was very good but stuck perfectly to his script, he wouldn’t have been much good at improv comedy. To get to the level that is set up for tourists, we had to walk 200 feet down a wooden staircase. Miners have been excavating the grey rock salt for over seven hundred years, so there are miles and miles of chambers, held up by tree trunks. It was cut out and taken away in barrels and barrel-shaped lumps of salt, both of which could be easily rolled along. Mining was very dangerous, so the miners were very religious, it was the only insurance they had. So miners carved out several chapels out of the salt where they could pray, and they are still in use today for weddings (if you have a couple of grand).

At the end of the tour is a restaurant, where I had a bloody lovely goulash and fried potatoes. It is also 130 metres below ground, the deepest meal I have ever eaten. Naturally, it was well seasoned.

After lunch, we got the train back to Krakow and then a number 3 tram across the Vistula to Oscar Schindler’s factory. It is now a museum about the history of the Nazi occupation of Krakow. The story is inventively presented, but it is a not a comfortable experience. There were many atrocities and the Jewish population, 50,000 before the war, were almost all murdered. It is thought that Schindler may have saved 1,200 people by giving them work in his factory.

We walked back towards our flat over the river and through the area where the Jewish Ghetto used to be. At the centre is Jewish Square, which is lined with Jewish restaurants, and no bacon sandwiches. There was an opportunity to eat a delicious goose stomach, but I didn’t fancy it tonight.

20171006_185703 — If I was a rich man – I wouldn’t eat goose stomach

Being exhausted from too much culture, we had a beer and shivered at an outside table as it got dark. We ate dinner in a cafe on Krakowska street, I had bigos (beef stew with sausage and cabbage), beer and Julie ate pierogi. I’m getting a taste for Polish food, it reminds me of school dinners, good sold fare.

Krakow Day 2 – Going Underground

It was already raining when we left the flat, and Julie was annoyed that BBC Weather had lied to us AGAIN! Having got the lie of the land, we walked up Grodzka to the Market Square, the heart of the old city of Krakow. The Market Square (Rynke Glowny) is 200 metres square and was laid out in 1257 when Duke Boleslaw the Chaste (not a Monty Python name) gave Krakow its charter. It’s the biggest square in Europe, and is surrounded by beautiful historic buildings. I have seen a few ancient squares in Brugge, Bristol, Prague and Seville, and this is the best.

Sitting in the middle is the Cloth Hall, which looks like a Renaissance building, but is actually 19th century. The arcade down the middle is lined with souvenir shops selling wooden toys, hats and fridge magnets. I got a charming fridge magnet for 15 Zlotys, probably too much. But the best is hidden beneath. A decade ago the square was excavated and all sorts of amazing archeology was exposed. When the archaeologists has finished, a huge concrete slab was laid over it and the dig became Rynek Underground Museum.

It is a very high tech museum, with lots of touch screens and low lighting, so low that the written signs were hard to read. Layers of old streets and foundations are shown, and a whole row of medieval shops which were used by all the local traders and craftsmen. We spent several hours in there, it is a very different and fascinating museum.

Emerging back into the square we walked a short way over the the Church of St Mary, which is a huge Gothic building with two towers at the front. Inside there is barely a square inch that is not decorated in some way. The highlight is the elaborately carved high alter, painted wooden statues and lots of gold leaf. We paid 10 zlotys to get in, but if we had been good Catholics we could have got on a different entrance to pray for nothing!

All that culture left us very hungry, so we went to a tourist trap and ate some poor food. I had Bigos, which is supposed to be a stew, but it was cabbage with a few bits of meat and lots of bread. It filled a gap but wasn’t great food.

The castle and cathedral are on Wawel Hill at the edge of the old town overlooking the Vistula, which was a trading route to The North Sea. There wasn’t enough time to go inside any of the buildings, so we had a look around the courtyard and enjoyed the views over the city.

By then we had seen enough old buildings and paintings and it was cold and raining. Time to go and get a coffee and cake, something that Poland is very good at.

And finally, I found Fred Flintstone’s bike parked in the street.

Krakow Day 1 – Mmm Vodka!

Poland isn’t an obvious places to go for a short holiday, but it should be. I have been here about eight hours and I’m already very impressed by the sights, sounds and tastes of Krakow.

We flew by EasyJet from Gatport Airwick, which is 850 miles and took about two hours. Krakow is in the south of Poland near Slovakia, and is in the middle of the invasion route for armies over the last thousand years. The Poles did see off the Mongols in the 13th century, but to be fair they had arrived by pony from Mongolia, which is a very long way.

To enjoy some local colour, we took the bus into the Krakow Glowny where there is an enormous shopping centre. We ate at almost the first cafe we came to, and had a spicy soup in a Mexican place. It was like a runny chilli con carne, very tasty and sweat-inducing. Thus replenished, we hoofed it down Pawia street to the apartment we had rented on Sukiennisca close to the Vistula river. The flat is modern, comfortable and devoid of any decorative touches, but it did have loads of hot water and a very good telly!

Its only five minutes walk to the Okol district which is at the foot of the hill where the castle sits. The main road is Grodzka, which is very popular with tourists, for good reason. It is full of beautiful old houses and churches, but also restaurants and shops. The Church of Saints Peter and Paul is a gorgeous Baroque edifice, like our own Saint Paul’s on a smaller scale.

By 6pm it was getting dark so we returned to the flat. The TV gave us a good selection of Polish TV, but Polish Masterchef didn’t keep my attention for long. I had brought and iPad and Chromecast, and by wrestling with the iPad and wifi managed to connect to Netflix. We watched “We’re the Millers”, which contrived to be both very funny and very filthy, a winning combination!

Julie had found a local restaurant called Pod Walwelem, which is close to the castle. It was big and noisy and busy. The waitresses looked like they were wearing Austrian dresses and carried the food and drink on large circular trays on their shoulder. I had pork pierogi (like ravioli) to start, which were very tasty, washed down with Tyskie beer. For my main meal I had the Soldiers Platter, which was a large plank covered with rice, fried potatoes, sauerkraut, and grilled chicken, liver, pork, bacon and sausage. It was a mixed grill on a massive scale! It took a while but I ate most of it apart from the very soft and squidgy blood sausage. As a digestif, we had lemon vodka, more lemon vodka then cherry vodka.

I like Krakow, but I may eat myself to death by the end of the holiday!

Chicago Day 11 – Lost in the Car Park

My plane back to London was scheduled for 7.30 in the evening, so I had the best part of a day left in Chicago. Plan A was for me to get the train into Union Station, leave my bag at left luggage, go to the Shed Aquarium, and get another train to O’Hare airport. After some research online, it turns out that there is no left luggage department at Union Station, doh!

So Plan B was put into action, Lizzie kindly drove me to Chicago and we went to Navy Pier on the Lake show near the mouth of the Chicago River. It is a very big concrete pier built for training sailors in the war, but it’s now a tourist destination. It gives excellent views of the Chicago skyline and has a row of tour boats alongside for trips into the lake. Lizzie parked in Level 1 Aisle C, and we went to explore.

You can see that there is a bit of difference in size between me and Liz. Which she lacks in size, she makes up with in personality!

We ate lunch in Bubba Gump Shrimp, named after Forest Gump’s best friend. The Jambalaya I had was very good, much better than I expected, and had loads of fat shrimps in it.

We failed spectacularly to find the car in the labyrinthine car park with confusing signage. It took us half an hour of dashing along the Pier at various levels, and up and down several lifts before we found the Mazda. Using Google Maps we started driving to Clinton Station for the Blue Line to the airport. Lizzie then decided we would go for Plan C, driving me straight to the airport. She dropped me at about 4.10 and in fifteen minutes I was checked in and through security, with a three-hour wait in departures to look forward to.

The journey back via Keflavik was long and uneventful. The best bit was when my lovely wife met me at the airport, what a gal!

Chicago Day 10 – Lake Police on Duty

I slept in until 9am, all the beer and rock music at the Fair must have worn me out.It was a beautiful morning so we took the ski boat out again. The Ski Ray is over twenty years old, but it’s a beast of a boat. There is a large lump in the middle, and underneath the cover is a 350 HP V8 engine, and it can go very fast! This time I managed to move out from behind the boat to the calm water beyond the wake, and then cross the wake to the calm water on the other side. The boat was going at about thirty miles an hour, so I was very chuffed with myself until I hit some bumpy water and fell on my face. My nostrils got a very rapid sluice out, but no harm was done. I think I could enjoy water skiing again, but it would need to be on the warm calm water, which isn’t available at home.

After lunch (burgers from the grill) we took the pontoon boat from Eagle Spring Lake to Lulu, for some more serious relaxing. At the entrance to Lulu was a small police boat containing two local cops. Every weekend there are two cops keeping an eye on the fifty or sixty people who go to Lulu to enjoy themselves, not a great use of police resources IMHO.

The weather was warm, the lake water was warm, and I was very relaxed. I clambered into an inflatable seat and bobbed around Lulu with a cold bottle of Corona clasped in my hand. Also, there is the bonus of being able to stay in the same place while “using the restroom” while drinking a beer.

In the evening I drove with Martin back to Clarendon Hills in his small Japanese sports car, alongside giant Mack and Peterbilt trucks on the Interstate highway, it felt a bit intimidating.

To wind down after the journey we went down to the basement and watched his giant TV. Martin likes YouTube, and he showed me some films by a guy called Colin Furze from Stamford. He builds ridiculous contraptions like rocket-powered go-carts and his own Wall of Death and tests them out himself.

Chicago Day 9 – Rockin’ in the USA

I have already done the ski boat, skull and paddle board, so canoe was next on my watercraft list was the canoe. Martin’s canoe came from a garage sale for $60, and it has a very well-worn look with patches of glue and fibreglass keeping the water out. We paddled the canoe around the perimeter of the 350-acre lake so we could look at all the beautiful houses. They are generally covered in white or blue aluminium siding, and the roofs are made of asphalt shingles. To my eyes, they look very neat and tidy and colourful, like Lego houses. Some are very big houses worth over a million dollars, and they are used just for summer weekends. Every house has a short pier with a pontoon boat , a ski boat and a selection of water toys. Martin’s cottage is one of the oldest and smallest on the lake and has his collection of boats at the end of the garden.

The weather was windy in the afternoon, and not conducive to more water skiing, so we drove to nearby Milwaukee for the Wisconsin State Fair. There is a permanent showground which is true to its agricultural roots by having huge barns in which buffed up livestock was being shown by teenagers parading past judges. In the dairy section there was a very useful sign explaining the nature of chocolate milk.

A more popular attraction was a vast funfair with every chunder-inducing ride you can think of. I’m way too old to go on all the spinning, whirling and swinging rides, but they are fun to watch. The most entertaining was a double seat attached to a hundred foot tall catapult. The riders are flung upwards at high velocity and then oscillate up and down. The riders are mic’d up so you can hear them squealing and swearing.

There are endless fast food stalls selling mountains of deep-fried food, I think you could get Type 2 Diabetes in a week eating that stuff. The traditional treat at the Fair is the Cream Puff. It is a bun of choux pastry about six inches across, which has been sliced across and filled with whipped cream. There is an entire building dedicated to making and selling Cream Puffs, and queues of hundreds of people who buy them and take them home in boxes. I tried one and it’s like a big chocolate eclair, without the chocolate.

There was a most interesting stall selling all sorts of dead animal material, mostly pelts and stuff creatures. Squirrels were put to great use in tableaus. What fun!

There are many different bands playing around the Fair, and we found the Cheapshots in the Budweiser Pavilion. They are a local Milwaukee covers band that played all the songs you want to hear, really really well; Shut Up and Dance, Play that Funky Music, Don’t Stop Believing, Jump, Uptown Funk. The funniest was Shake It Off, because the singer was a big guy with a baseball cap and he had all of Taylor’s moves! Drinking beer and singing along was fantastic fun, happy days!

Chicago Day 8 – A steamy afternoon in Illinois

Martin does love a bit of mechanical engineering, especially if it’s at least a hundred years old. We drove south from Wisconsin into Illinois to go to the North Illinois Steam Society Threshing Bee. It was a get together of steam and tractor enthusiasts, with hundreds of magnificent old machines and interesting characters. It was very similar to the Traction Engine Rally that we went to as kids at Carrington on Lincolnshire Fens. The enormous steam engines would have less power than a modern small car and took a lot of work to operate. Every one of them was a labour of love by their very proud owners. There was a sale to support the society, and I bought three brand new baseball caps and three old copies of National Geographic for $3, quite a bargain.

The guy below was my favourite, with his straw hat, mutton-chop whiskers and bare feet!

There was a sale to support the society, and I bought three brand new baseball caps and three old copies of National Geographic for $3, quite a bargain. In fact, it came to $2.55, but having a big heart, I let them keep the change.

There were stalls manned by enthusiastic re-enactors with old wartime gear. one guy was dressed as a WW1 German soldier, who was showing off a large collection of hand grenades and tench maces. I’ll bet he had some trouble getting through airport security with that lot!

Our journey back to Eagle Spring Lake took us through typical Mid-West farmland, which was mile after mile of Soybeans and maize. That’s all there was, an agro-industrial duo-culture for creating food for beef cattle to make steaks and burgers.

Wisconsin has a tradition of the Friday night Fish Fry. Martin took us along to a local golf club, which was packed with eager fish eaters. Lizzie struck up a conversation with another couple, who really love the British Royal family. They wanted to know my opinion of them because I was a subject of the Queen. I think the Queen does a great job as Head of State, but otherwise, I don’t think about them much. The other fish eaters really didn’t like Prince Charles because of his dysfunctional relationship with Princess Diana. But I have never met them, I’m not interested in their private life, and quite honestly don’t give a shit.

My choice of fish was Walleye, and it came as a breaded fillet which could have been any white fish. It could easily have been that great favourite River Cobbler AKA Vietnamese Catfish that often appears in English supermarkets. The accompaniments were potato pancakes, coleslaw, rye bread, and some strange potato and bacon dish. It was all tasty and filling, but once was enough. I washed it down with a lager that came with a slice of orange in it, but it didn’t actually taste of orange. As a cultural experience, it was about as exotic as Fish and Chip Friday at Wetherspoons.

Chicago Day 7 – Back to Eagle Spring Lake

We woke early and got the camp packed away very quickly, Munising’s charms wear off very rapidly. Back on the road we travelled south through the Upper Peninsular and back into Wisconsin. We stopped briefly at a souvenir store to try on daft hats and be amazed at the vast amount of tat on sale. The gorgeous titfer below is a “cheesehead” hat as worn by fans of the Green Bay Packers, I think it would be perfect at Ascot.

Three hundred miles later we were back at Eagle Spring Lake in the sunshine. Martin got his ski boat out, a twenty-five-year-old craft with a powerful inboard motor. I sat on the back of the boat on a platform and put on a pair of water skis and a tight buoyancy aid. Slipping off the back of the boat, I floated in the water with my knees close to my chest and skis sticking out vertically, grasping the handle of the tow rope. Martin slowly moved ahead until the rope was tight and I shouted: “hit it’”. I got up, wobbled and did a face plant in the lake. I tried again, and at my second attempt I was up and skiing! I managed two circuits of the lake before I got tired and gave up. I was very pleased with myself since I haven’t skied for eight years!

I had a bash at paddle boarding, but only succeeded in going round in circles, so I gave that up quickly. The single skull was more my kinda boat and I got on well with that, but the lake was a bit choppy and my blades kept catching crabs. There are no actual crabs in the lake, but there are turtles, snakes and plenty of fish.

Chicago Day 6 – Marvelous Munising

I really wouldn’t recommend Munising for a long holiday. There is basically only one reason why tourists visit Munising – the Picture Rocks – which I will describe later. It is a small town on an enormous lake. Lake Superior is the size of Austria and has an average depth of 483 feet, if you spread it out like Marmite across the entirety of North and South American, it would cover it to a depth of 30 centimetres!

We booked a boat trip at midday, so we had the morning to explore Munising. About 10 minutes would have been enough, there really is bugger-all there. The main employment is a paper mill, and then a small number of shops and banks in a few street parallel to the lake shore. It was once famous for making wooden bowls, but Ikea has now cornered that market.

Martin went back to the campsite to get his hat, so we literally had to run to get on the boat with about 50 other excited tourists. A couple of miles from the harbour the Picture Rocks begin. They are Limonite (a type of iron ore) cliffs which have been stained with manganese (black) and copper (bluey green) in very pretty patterns. They also have caves and rock arches underneath them, which collapse occasionally. For a couple of hours, we chugged up and down and admired their loveliness, and waved to the people at the top of the cliffs.

There are not many places to eat in Munising, but there is a rather excellent branch of Subway. I always hesitate when I have to choose a combination of bread, meat and various salads and condiments, it makes me feel a bit doddery. I was brought up simply asking for six penn’orth of chips, no choices apart from salt and vinegar.

In the afternoon we drove out of Munising to a State Park where we could walk along the top of the cliffs, with great views of the lake. There is a rock formation called the Castle which is fenced off to prevent people climbing up it and wearing it down. Sadly it didn’t stop this bloke, he did make it down again after his mate had taken his photo.

Once we had seen Picture Rocks from all the angles, we felt that we had seen all that Munising had to offer. So we returned to the campsite to cook some more food and swore at the pathetic barbecue which only managed to simmer our chicken dinner and burn our sweetcorn on the open fire. But what the hell, I was hungry and anything tastes good if you wash it down with enough beer.

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