Category: Europe 2018

Breakfast in Suwalki was the first breakfast in Europe that didn’t include croissants. It did include pickles and deviled eggs.

Our bus to Vilnius left Suwalki at 12:45 today. This morning we went to the local mall to spend the last of our Polish money. We bought snacks, Easter cards, stamps and a new wallet for Duke. We hung out until the last moment but still spent 45 minutes out in the snow, cold and wind waiting for our bus. It was invigorating.

What we have seen of Vilnius is beautiful. We had dinner at Lokys Restaurant. We ate in the basement of the fifteenth century restaurant. We started with herring and a lentils salad.

For the main course I had boar with pears and Duke had beef stew.

Our walk back to the hotel was cold and snowy but beautiful.

Tonight, our last night in Poland, we are in the extreme north east very near the Lithuania border. The scenery on the train ride today reminded me of northern Michigan and Wisconsin., lots of trees and frozen marshy land.

Suwalki is a town of 70,000 people. It seems like a prosperous town. We walked from the train station to our hotel and then went out exploring. We are at 54 degrees north. That’s well north of anything in the continental United States. The third picture below is our hotel.

For dinner we ate at Karczma Polska Restaurant. It was a warm and cozy setting.

We started with potato sausage.

Then Duke had pork tenderloin and I had chicken with an almond crust.

The apple cake we had for desert was wonderful.

Today was our last train ride of the trip. Tomorrow we take the bus to Vilnius, Lithuania.

We returned from Krakow to Warsaw today by high speed train. We will have to come back to Poland again because there are many sights we would like to have visited and things we would like to have done that we didn’t have time for.

This afternoon we did go to the observation platform at the top of the Palace of Culture and Science. According to Rick Steves it is the tallest building between Frankfurt and Moscow.

We had dinner in our hotel. The Palonis Palace.

Today we toured Auschwitz and Birkenau. It was difficult, and sad and powerful. To actually see what I have read about and to appreciate the size of the camps and the monstrous number of people who were murdered here…. I’m glad we visited even if just to bear witness.

We had another great dinner. We ate on the main square which had a lot fewer people than on Sunday when we were here.

This morning we took the high speed train from Warsaw to Krakow. We arrived around noon. Then we went for a walk through Krakow old town. Today is Palm Sunday so there were a million people out walking. Many were carrying arrangements of grain and flowers.

For dinner we went to Nota Resto. We started with salad then curry squash soup.

For the main course I had pierogis with a duck meat and chestnut filling. Duke had beef. They were both fabulous.