Geoff & Krysia's excellent adventure, part VII. Europe Sept 2000
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This travelogue documents our travels through the countries of Central Europe in September 2000.
Our aim was to experience the sights and culture of some of the the less westernised parts of Europe, and as well as some of the tourist hot-spots [e.g. Prague], to travel to some more out of the way areas [e.g. Slovakia and Eastern Poland].
Planning was greatly assisted by guidebooks and the Internet, but the trickiest part was trying to fit as much as possible in to three weeks without overdoing it, or spending too much time travelling. In the end we got the balance pretty much right.
The travelogue was written as a daily journal on the road, with HTML, links and images added later.
We can't wait for our next visit!
Got a taxi from work [via home to pick up Krysia and luggage] to SFO. Having checked a few days before, I was expecting to pay around $50 to get to the airport - in the end it cost $107 [including a 25% surcharge for an 'empty return' which we hadn't been told about] which came as a shock. Won't be doing that again!
It was warm, calm and sunny in California, perfect flying weather, and so the flight started out smoothly. Over Hudson Bay however, we ran into some rough turbulence for about an hour, after that, it was as smooth as silk again.
I had tried to buy a book at the airport, but the selection was very limited, so I came away with just a magazine. Getting aboard a 10 hour flight without a book is something I normally avoid. The Virgin flight has quite a good entertainment system however, with individual screens, which means they can show a number of programs simultaneously, and they're able to show movies which are a bit more risque than your average airline fare. On the down side, some of the channels seemed to have a problem which resulted in the audio blanking out for a few seconds at odd intervals - this happened frequently enough that those channels were effectively unusable.
We saw an episode of "3rd Rock from the Sun" that we'd previously missed seeing, and then a good little movie [the name of which I don't recall now].
For some unfathomable reason I took Krysia's suggestion not to take a sleeping pill, with the inevitable consequence that I didn't sleep a wink, and arrove in the UK with my brain at half mast.
There was what seemed like an interminable wait for our baggage, followed by a quick walk through what appeared to be a completely unmanned customs area to meet Krysia's sister Joasia who was picking us up. This process took an hour from when we'd touched down.
Last time I was in the UK Joasia had picked us up at Gatwick and got lost on the way home, which included taking the wrong motorway exit and heading towards Hastings, and then turning off the main road down a small alleyway before finding the correct road. This time we had high hopes of better navigation which were dashed when she got lost inside the terminal building. On the way to London we followed the previous trips escapade exactly, even down to the sojourn down the exact same alleyway...
Tomorrow we get the ferry at Dover for Calais. On the news we see that there is ongoing disruption in France because of protests over fuel prices. Previously they've blockaded channel ports, oil refineries, and most recently the Chunnel. We'll just have to hope that they don't start blocking the ports again tomorrow.
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