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Hello!

I survived a week in Slovakia on the Polish border & a week in the Czech Republic for a fine family wedding and am now in Germany at the start of my final week in Europe.

I saw plenty of Poland from the south side of the Dunajec, hiking with family members and a group from the Stara Lubovna hospital on what we might call the company picnic. Then hiked around the Sulin - Maly Lipnik heights and along the Polish border along the Poprad river (with Poland on the north bank) up to Zavodie. Happily I arrived about 3 weeks after some extremelz heavz rains and some flooding and the earth was dry again and pleasant to hike. The terrain must match the Arkansaw razorbacks from my best guess, there is some pretty steep up and down.

In between all that I went to the Goral festival at Cervenz Klastor and the Rusyn-Ukrainian festival at Svidnik,which of course added a small side trip to Dukla and a view of Poland from the tower. My military career was as short as I could legally make it (2 years). The pass looks broad and intersting, but I am thankful I was not around for that fight.

So it will be ten dayz or sobefore I get back to an American keyboard and chance to compose any details - and at that there will probably be a lot of pressing things in life to take care of.

The Slovak-Polish border is sure a beautiful piece of real estate!

Kai

Kai,

Polish-Slovak boarder was the only one we could hike freely even during communism. I was also once in Cerveny Klastor. My dad speaks Slovaks and Czech. The next time you do need to cross the boarder also, but I think Poland is more expensive than SLovakia. You know - from Slovakian side Tatras looks much more different than from Poland - Poland is more hilly, in Slovakia there is a contrast from almost flat ground to the high alpine looking Tatra.

We Poles always envy Slovaks for having so much more Tatras!

Any pictures?

Kai, gload you Enjoyed your trip. Carl

Just got home to Alaska an hour ago so have some laundry and chores to do. I also go to work tomorrow and did not sleep on the airplane, surprisingly. THere is a ten hour difference between Europe and Alaska and the flight was 9.5 hours, so I landed before I took off!

Now to get through the day and night. Normaly I get to work early the next few days and leave early to collapse from the time change, and after three days I am adapted. I am also typing on the new (USB) Slovak keyboard. It sure makes getting the special characters easier!

Kai

Kai,

I am glad you enjoyed your travel and came back before you even started yoru travel!

I tried to send this message yesterday but my internet did not work properly, it was just so slow that I spent my time hopelessly trying to do something.

Just thought I would try to post a few pictures of Poland from across the river, but I see it is much more complicated than I thought. I will have to reduce the size fo the photos and find somewhere on the web to post them so I can reference them in the post.

Rather complicated! I am pretty well over the ten hour time difference, but miss the great food over there!

Kai

If Forza sees this post, he would say to try "photobucket.com" That is where he hides - I mean stores - his pictures.

I would like to see those photos, Kai!

Webshots is good to. You can set the photos to screen size or full size.

Hi to All -

No, I did not fall off the end of the world, I have taken time to be lazy, be ambitious, recover from the fine vacation, and finally work on some photos and text. Thinking of a general report to all of you was one of the incentives to get moving. Here is a short report and first attempt at referencing some photos. I was ready to sign up at photobucket but they asked for personal information, and I figure in these days Big Brother has it all anyhow, so I went to TinyPics.com and tried posting a few photos there. All are reduced in size to aid downloading and hopefully still carry the beauty of the country.

Next Post ...
Kai the Wanderer

It is taking a while to live life and to process all the photos and even to write the thank you notes to all the people in Europe for all their hospitality. I will be posting pictures at TinyPics.com the URLs are at the end of the post, I hope they work!

My trip along the Polish border is shown with shots from Slovakia of the Polish side of the Dunajec River in the PIENAP international park. Poland declared their side of the Pieniny a reserve in 1930 and the Czechoslovaks followed two years later in 1932. So the Pieninski Pas Skalkowi are visible from the Slovak side. I was lucky enough to walk along with a group from a local �company picnic� from Stara Lubovna. The pictures from this walk are the Dunajec River.jpg [url=BellaOnline ALERT: For anti-spam reasons, we restrict the number of URLs allowed in a given post. You have exceeded our maximum number of URLs.