Ending Point: N48°42 E44°31
Distance Traveled: 0.7 miles
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We woke up at the Local Hostel, which was soon becoming a Mongol Rally Hostel, as the other three members of the Thunderyaks arrived in the night. We swapped stories of the road over a market breakfast in the park just below the hostel and attempted to come up with a plan for the day. Well, planning too much isn’t Rally style, so we decided to go to the Mother Russia statue and take it from there. Many of the buses from our corner go to the statue, but we didn’t get on one of those. Once the bus turned in the wrong direction, we jumped off and then found a taxi nearby. Our German-speaking driver saw no problem with the six of us piling into his Soviet-era Lada, so off we went. We didn’t exactly communicate which historical location we wanted to go to, and so we made a stop at the museum on the Volga River and took in the panorama. From there, we found an underground tram station near the large Lenin statue and finally headed in the right direction. The Mother Russia statue is on the top of a small hill so she can be seen throughout the area. So, to get to her feet (you have to touch the statue or you haven’t really been there), we walked past a couple of reflecting pools and smaller statues and carvings. Then, we passed through a room with an eternal flame to commemorate the Russian soldiers who lost their lives in World War II. From Mother Russia’s feet, we could appreciate the scale of the statue and have a nice view of the city and river below. The journey back from the statue was much easier than the one there; we just had to take the underground tram five stops. We celebrated another good day in Volgograd with a big dinner at a café on the block that the Thunderyaks had found the night before. Dinner turned into drinks with the owner and his friends, who were also trying to help our Italian friends come up with a solution for their car problems. By the end of the night, Vlad (the owner and overall guy in charge) was calling us all brothers; he also thought that since we were coming from Alaska, we were practically Russian-Americans. Just before we left, we shared a bag of coffee from The Grind in Girdwood, Alaska, to cement our friendship. Starting Point: N48°42 E44°30
Ending Point: N48°42 E44°31 Distance Traveled: 0.7 miles
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There are late starts, and then there are late starts in Poland. We woke up in the hostel in Krakow, had a bit of the continental breakfast left out for our group, and recounted the events of the night before (some of which you can find on the previous post here, some of which are Pandaland jokes that don’t belong on here). Then, we went out to see some of the sights of the city that we had only glimpsed the night before, including walking around the main square and market. After a brief daylight tour of the city, we headed south to the Wieliczka Salt Mine, one of the twelve original UNESCO World Heritage sites. Before and after lunch in the café there, Andrew finangled us press entry with a private tour guide. The tour took us through three levels and down to 150 meters below the surface. Our favorite rooms were St. Kinga’s Chapel and the underground pool where we tossed in a coin with a prayer to get us to Mongolia. We also licked salt straight off the walls! Our tour guide even gave us lumps of rock salt to take on our travels; we won’t run out of salt for a long time now. We left Wieliczka but didn’t make it too far that night, choosing to camp in Nowy Sacz (a small town near the Slovak border) after a few shopping stops. We were the lead car, using paper maps to navigate after some mix-ups with the SatNav (GPS), and so we were happy to find a great spot for us all to stop for the night and make a big dinner. Starting Point: N50°06 E19°93
Ending Point: N49°37 E20°42 Distance Traveled: 70.4 miles |