From Dresden we drove to a place called Bolkow, stayed the night there and then onto Krakow. Both these days were fairly tiring driving days as we tended to be going through small towns a lot rather than major highways. This is nice in some ways as you get to see more of how people live but it does make the days long. The other reason that made driving difficult is that our gps only works for West Europe and while we had downloaded an East Europe gps app onto the iPad it wasn’t as easy to use and we got lost both times trying to find the campsites. I was exhausted both nights and the first day in Krakow we just rested at the campsite and did some washing.

The next day we went into Krakow for some sightseeing. We found the public transport not as easy as in other cities we’ve been to so far- for example when we asked at the caravan park how often the bus goes into the city we were answered with “sometimes you have to wait 5 minutes, sometimes 20” but we figured it out eventually.

The main thing I wanted to visit in Krakow was the Oskar Schlinder factory which is now a WWII in Krakow museum. (Oskar Schlinder, made famous in the movie Schlinder’s List, was a Nazi but used his factory to rescue a thousand Jews from concentration camps). The museum was very well done and took you through rooms in chronological order of how the war impacted the Jews in Krakow. It was good background information for our trip to Auschwitz the following day.

Auschwitz was our main reason for going to Poland and while Aaron was eager to put his history degree to use I still hadn’t made up my mind if I wanted to go or not. I eventually decided to but I don’t think anything prepares you for it. There really aren’t any words to describe the horrors people went through in these death camps. Going there makes the whole thing very real, not just something you learn about at school or in documentaries, and the sheer volume of people who died there is just unthinkable. It was a very somber experience and something we talked about for several days afterwards.

From Auschwitz we drove to Slovakia for one night and then headed to Vienna. On the way we stopped at Bojnice Castle which is an amazing castle which we enjoyed walking around through the gardens. We had lunch in the town there with castle views. Then we drove to Vienna, Austria.