After our somewhat adventurous day in Zakopane, our next day was spent touring the somber Auschwitz Museum in Oswiecim, Poland. We had an English speaking guide who took us through the first part of the tour which included the museum, visited the barracks, gas houses and crematoriums. The second part of the tour takes you two kilometers down the road to Birkenau with the infamous railway platform. The size of the camp is beyond imagination and to walk in the same footpaths as the Jews that perished there is beyond description.

We quietly departed for our hotel in Krakow with an intent to stop for dinner along the way. Somewhere, we lost the Stenach car and ended up sitting for 45 minutes hoping they would find their way back. No luck...so we decided they had good maps although their cell phone was no longer working and they probably had found the highway to Krakow and were headed to the hotel so we began again. We called the hotel to alert them to call us if they arrived and to our relief they did!

We stopped for dinner at a typical Polish establishment along the way and had wonderful food! After arriving at our hotel in Krakow at a late hour we decided that we all needed to sleep in the next morning and skip the Wieliczka Salt Mine tour.

We woke up to pouring rain and had to rethink our plans for the day. Luckily while we were eating, the sun finally came out. Everyone did their own thing...shopping, touring, sightseeing. Krakow is a lovely, charming and vibrant city. The majority of the group went on a tour with our guide, Pavel. We saw incredible cathedrals, buildings, the Pope in the window and the Wawel Castle. While in the castle, I was looking at some lovely ivy, a type which I had not seen before and thought "Skip will know what kind of ivy this is." When I turned around to find him he wasn't with our group and we realized we had lost him about an hour or so before and no one noticed!!! Seems he got sidetracked with a watercolor painting and a bottle of beer!

Dinner was at a famous Polish restaurant and the food was tasty! Several people ordered Holubki (or Gowumpkie as they call them in Polish). Much to their surprise the size of them were like small loaves of bread!

Off we were to finish off the evening...some chose to have drinks in the fabulous courtyard and then Skip treated us to a wonderful horse and carriage ride. The town square is full of these carriages and with no automobile traffic makes you feel like it is the turn of the century.

Tomorrow we are headed back to Slovakia and hopefully some normalcy and a slower pace in the villages.