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Published: June 25th 2014
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Having had my arse immobilized for far to long, a planned trip to Italy and the Balkans went down the drain due to my busted knee cap.
Finally after 11 weeks I could swing my leg over my saddle and get on the bike again, also a good time to get a new bike, a thing I postponed due to not knowing how long time it would take my knee to heal.
Maybe I was to be amputated what did i know, anyway I cancelled my up and coming BMW in march.
Time came and I got the new beast, a spanking new BMW 1200 GSA, info for those of youy who care for the rest it's a nice big white motorbike that goes wrooom if you twist the right side grip.
So why not break it in with a new trip and as Krakow has been in the back of my head for some time, Krakow was it.
Due to some work, yes they allow me for rehab purposes to go to work for two hours a day, I had to postpone my departure.
To save some time and my behind that has lost
all the callouses gained on the last outing I took the ferry to Kiel.
A boooring trip. As they've got you by the short and curlies everything is expensive onboard and I don't like being ripped off.
I donned my earplugs and actually slept and thus arrived bright and bushy tailed with stars in my eyes in Germany.
The first thing to do was to buy some stuff for the bike, some panniers and a GPS, nothing from the old bike fits on the new bike, crafty bastard the Hun.
I had printed a map from the net and actually arrived directly to a BMW dealer in Hamburg, they had the panniers but no locks, meaning that some not obeying the seventh commandment not only could be the new owner of my stuff but also my new panniers!
So I got the GPS and stuck with my dry bag tied to the back of the bike.
I am not overly impressed with the endeavours of Mssr Garmin, the GPS reset it's planning about 3 times and then made out some outrageous route taking me north of Berlin, but I didn't really care, a detour
is also a tour.
And with the GPS set to avoid motorways I meandered through the North German landscape,the weather gods slovly made the rain and drizzle go away and the sun came out the forgot to turn the heater on.
After having consulted a fellow biker outside Berlin I ended up in Potsdam, where one Freddy the Great, now whe're not talking about Freddie Mercury but a Jerry emperor no less, made a nice little summerhouse called Sans Souci.
I got a hotel without parking but in the end as many times before my back ended up on the hotels patio, pushed through a corridor.
I untaped my walking stick from the handlebars and went in search of liquid refreshment, preferably something based on the fermentation of barley or grapes.
A bit of a limping walkabout later saw me falling asleep in my nice room.
To make things easier for the GPS and my knee the next day was a shortie down to Wroclaw in Poland.
I like old city centres, the older the better, and Poland has got a fair share of those.
Set GPS to find a hotel and
a bit later I'm settled with the bike under lock and guard,CCTV and for the same procedure as last night.
Wroclaw turned out nice enough, with good chances of nice birds passing by, I am, after a fashion, a very keen ornithologist
Polish food leaves a lot to be desired, especially if you don't eat pork.
A crummy/ crumbed turkey steak later I trotted back to da room.
Krakow is nice, actually very nice and as I arrived early I set out to explore, walking stick in hand I spotted a place for liquid refreshment also a tincture for frayed nerves, The Poles drive like shit, aggressively with little or no consideration, a bit like Bolivia I'd say.
On the way to Krakow I passed Oswiecim aka Auschwitz one of the places on this planet that doG truly forgot.
I thought that I'd give it a miss, but in the end I went.
It's one of Polands greatest tourist attractions and it's a strange feeling milling with people dressed for summer around a place where evil ran rampant and showed how low people could sink in the killing and torture of their neighbours.
I took a few pics, not like many who to pics of everything, I also don't have pics of Pol Pot's experiments in genocide. Methinks that the memory of those places will stay with me until my CPU closes down for good.
A brewskie or two , and later on dinner with an Argie couple who where also on the Auschwitz excursion.
I could have stayed in Krakow for a couple of days more but I went down to the Tatra mountains instead , no pics of them either mainly due to bad weather, mist and the occasional shower made it a waste of time.
I went west, up through Slovakia starting to go home Prague was to far away so I went, on the recommendation from a guy in a petrol station, to Olomouc instead. Olomouc is quite nice! After a so so dinner I found solace in a winebar.
This was also my first walkabout without my stick, progress!
On the recommendation of the lady in the reception I criss crossed the Czech republic through quaint villages.
It was very cold and windy and in the end I abandoned quaintness for
Prague.
I've been to Prague before and it's breath-taking but when you can hardly walk across the Charles bridge due to the crowds it takes a lot of the charm away.
Still it was nice to see it again, even the masses of people trotting around can't take away the beauty of this city, walk one block away from what's found in Lonely planet and threre's no one there.
I found a place that served Absinthe, never tried that before so I gave it a go, note to self ask how much it costs before you order, 8 euros for a wee dram, well it was like 75% but still.
There ought to be less people in Dresden and it's on the way home so after a crummy czech hotel breakfast I went to Germany.
There are some astoundlingly beautiful buildings in Dresden, all rebuilt since 1945 as the Allies thought it be a good idea to bomb Dresden back into the stone age.
There were, after almost a weeks bombin, very few bricks standing on top of another, pics show an almost total devastation.
It was a payback for what the Hun
did to Coventry.
The most amazing thing was that, taken in consideration that this was the former East Germany, they didn't build it up as a proletarian paradise out of unpainted concrete.
Time to go home, I'd promised a client my two daily hours on Thursday this week so I started to go back via small mountain range called the Harz, pretty enough and also the birth place for many of the Grimm brother's stories. Even Wagner used the place in one of his operas!
Having been in the Andes, they seemed a bit on the low side.
I had a nice dinner with some cured ham and stone oven baked bread and maybe some wine.
The next morning it was time to go home, it takes for ever to do 400 km if you're not on the motorway, but then again you see a lot of German villages and churches.
If as Marx said religion is the opium of the people, you can easlily draw the conclusion that there are a lot of addicts around, that goes for Poland Slovakia and the Czech republic as well.
The ferry took me from Kiel
back to Gothenburg.
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