Eastern European Expedition: Road Trips In Poland, Czech Republic, And Hungary

Eastern European Expedition: Road Trips In Poland, Czech Republic, And Hungary – We were about to board our plane to Europe when the travel conference we were going to attend was canceled due to COVID-19. Although this gave us pause, it was March 3 and no one knew the speed and ferocity of the pandemic that was making its way to every corner of the world. The flights were on time and we didn’t want to waste a ticket to Europe so we boarded. Stuck and optimistic, we mobilized Plan B and a dream we’d had for years… take a motorhome in Eastern Europe! Within five days of landing in Berlin, we rented an Indie Campers motorhome and went on a five-country road trip…or so we thought.

Just two hours from the German border is Poznań, the birthplace of Poland. We approached this 1,000-year-old city and immediately realized that we had underestimated the beauty of this country. Plaça del Mercat Vell was surrounded by hand-painted merchant districts and anchored by a towering Renaissance town hall. Just around the bend was a pink marble church so ornate it rivaled those in Florence. Continuing our ramblings through the cobbled streets, Mike stopped in front of a gallery of abstract portraits. “Mom would love these.” Mike’s mother, Patricia, is not only an avid art collector, she is 100% Polish, and she also knew he would appreciate a piece of the motherland. We looked around (a little nervous about the price tags that might come from this two-level gallery) and the artist himself, Piotr Myszkowski, greeted us with a smile. We told her about Patricia and she took us to the perfect painting in the back. Sold! He thanked us for supporting his work and said, “I’d love to treat you to lunch.” We went next door to his friends’ Italian-Polish grocery store and he started cutting foccacia, pouring wine, and began a two-hour meal filled with laughter and polka lessons. While his wife was showing me the correct spin-kick-hop move, his phone rang. “Alert COVID-19”, a new social distancing rule of 1.5 meters had come into force. She played it, but change was in the air.

Eastern European Expedition: Road Trips In Poland, Czech Republic, And Hungary

We continued south to Głogów, the town where Mike’s great-grandmother Sophie Zając was born. Without too much information from Ancestry.com, we took a renegade approach to digging up family roots… go to the bar and start asking around for anyone with that last name (FYI Zając means “wild hare” in Polish). This was not. taking us too far, but two pints of Tyskie beer had us planning a visit to the town hall in the morning. We met with the registrar, only to discover that when Sophie was born here in 1877, the region was under German control and they left no records. Attempt #3: The tourist office. As a city that was 95% destroyed by the Russians in the last days of World War II, Głogów does not receive many foreign visitors, except those who are also looking for their family roots. In fact, the visitor center employees doubled as hobbyist genealogists. Our new friend Wojtek gave us tons of resources, then drove around the rest of the day to show us around the older parts of this 10th century city. We didn’t even tell him we were bloggers, he just offered voluntarily the VIP tour inside the moat walls, the bombed-out cathedral that only opens a few times a year and the city’s original market square hidden below. street level Although we didn’t learn more details about great-grandmother Sophie, we felt deeply connected to her for the first time.

Day Europe Itinerary

Sailing through southern Poland, we were only 100 kilometers from the Czech border and felt we needed a special adventure for our wedding anniversary that day. The northern city of Olomouc has one of the top 10 restaurants in the country and its vegan menu was calling our name. The entrance was absolutely whimsical, with a ceiling of fairy-lit branches and vine-covered walls, but you could tell something was wrong. The tables were whispering and the waiters seemed abandoned. Then our server informed us about the breaking news about the coronavirus: the country’s borders were about to be closed. And with that our celebratory dinner turned into an emergency planning session. “Should we go to Slovakia, hide here in the Czech Republic, or go back to Poland, where we can explore your ancestry and live off pierogies?” We debated going home, but that meant thousands of dollars in flights, quarantining in our camper storage facility in Texas, and resurfacing in a country with much higher infection rates. The next morning we made it back to Poland and the border was closed behind us…indefinitely.

We had a feeling our sightseeing days were numbered, so we headed straight to the UNESCO World Heritage city of Krakow. There were still some shops, restaurants and tours offered, but this was not the tourist haven it is known to be. A busker played a bittersweet cello sonata and it echoed through the empty streets. A shopkeeper at the Cloth Market slumped over his glass case of tchotchkes, no doubt thinking about the loss of income for the next few weeks. We went to the old Jewish quarter for potato pancakes and a scrawled sign said it was their last day to sit down. One of the few types of dining that had yet to be regulated was home cooking classes, our favorite kind! The next night we booked a private “Pierogi Power Workshop” through Eataway, a network of 500 chefs in 73 countries. And luckily, it was organized by the founder herself and our first Polish angel, Marta Bradshaw. As we rolled, filled and pinched pierogies, we shared our collective fears and dampened them with wine. Her full tour class schedule was getting thin so fast she turned off the alerts so she wouldn’t cry. Now we were stuck in a country that closed all services to visitors: tourist offices, cultural institutions, hotels, campsites, restaurants, basically all the essentials of a trip. As we parted with bellies full of delicious mushroom dumplings and borscht soup, Marta graciously extended an open invitation to her cabin in the woods and the comfort that we were not alone.

If we weren’t seasoned travelers (on the road full-time since January 2012) and didn’t have this autonomous Fiat motorhome, we probably would have freaked out. Being stuck in a foreign land in a 120 square foot rental could have been a nightmare, but we had everything we needed to isolate ourselves safely and happily (thanks, Indie Campers!). This luxury rig had a kitchen, bathroom, shower, ample storage and a surprisingly versatile and spacious living room (see our motorhome tour here). Having said that, a closed camping sector did not facilitate the satisfaction of our basic needs. Drinking water, waste disposal, and a safe place to camp were all in question, and there was certainly nowhere to hook up to a power source. To get enough battery life to run the lights, water pump, heater fan, and charge our electronics, we had to drive about two hours a day. The recommended action of “shelter in place” was to become “shelter in motion”. The road trip to Poland must continue!

So we took the back roads, away from urban areas and the feeling of a zombie apocalypse. Guided by our trusty Lonely Planet Poland guidebook and our Park4Night app (Europe’s boondocking bible!), we headed south to Zakopane and the Tatra Mountains. Snow-capped jagged peaks towered over this fairy-tale village. The area is known for its various wooden houses with ornate carved facades, wide gables and folk motifs of the highland region. In one of the churches designed by the founder in the Zakopane style, we saw a procession of men in embroidered trousers and feathered caps carrying silk banners and singing. The social distancing note had not reached the mountains, but we felt very lucky to see this glimpse of traditional Polish communities. From there we followed our GPS up Gubałówka Mountain to the most perfect (errr quarantine) camping spot, with a fire ring, picnic table and unobstructed views of the snowy range and valley of the villages. We stayed here three days and could have happily camped longer, but if we wanted to see more of the mountains, we had to beat the incoming cold front.

Austria Road Trip Itinerary, Map & Planner

The Carpathians extend to the Pieniny Mountains which culminate in the magnificent Tres Corones massif. We went to the trailhead and an innkeeper came out to say that this popular route was closed due to the pandemic. We figured they couldn’t block an entire mountain, so we took a country road, talked to a local farmer, and took his advice on a back trail. We had a clear picture of the three peaks, which actually looked like a gnarled crown, and great views of Slovakia across the river. Further down, we saw a bridge barricaded with armed soldiers; these men were an ominous reminder that the border should not be crossed. we drove

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