Warsaw to Krakow

After getting over the horrendous drive into the town, we ended up with a wonderful feeling for the place.  We stayed about two blocks off the main street, where the presidential palace and the university of warsaw are.  The lower half of the street is primarily shops and restaraunts, while the upper half consists of many palaces, many of which compose the university.  They do know how to build palaces.  Further up this road leads into a huge pedestrian square, with the old town portion of the city.  There's another square just there, filled with pigeons, which people acutually feed???  Our friend Lonnie calls them"flying rats"...........Further up, and you have to understand that further up with Donna can become an infantry training march, you get to the new town.
 It's really difficult to imagine this city is even here today.  We went to the Warsaw Uprising museum and spent most of the morning learning about the destruction of this city when the Nazis retreated.  As they did, they were issued orders to level the town, which they did.  So everything you see in our pictures has been rebuilt from rubble since the war.  It's quite remarkable.  Before the war, there were 1.3 million people living here---afterwards, 900,000.  Saw a portion of the ghetto wall afterwards and made another trip up to the old town.  My feet are-----never mind.
 Went to dinner at an Indian restaurant just down from our place.  Somebody posted on trip advisor that " this was the best restaurant ever!"  We imagine that he still works there.........as my cousin says, "not so much".

We leave the next morning for Krakow, about 200 miles away, with an estimated driving time of five hours.  Heading out of Warsaw, we're on this brand new motorway, doing 80, and I'm thinking they are so wrong,  we'll be there in a couple of hours.  Of course, they're right............We see two accidents where it's obvious that a car passing has had to go off the road-----on the other side, to avoid a head on.  I used to think the Spanish drivers the worst, but I have changed my mind.  the only stress that ever exists for us on these trips is driving into a large city.  Trying to read road signs in foreign languages has it's difficulties.  Donna is an incredible navigator----reminds me of the rally car races they show on tv over here....they're doing a hundred miles per hour on a logging road and the navigator in the passenger seat is saying "straight--fast, slow right--straight fast---hard left".  Arrive at the apartment building, but not sure that its the right one cause Donna's pretty sure it looks at the town square.  So off we go, get stuck in a dead end in the middle of the old town, which i have to back out of and end up at the same place we found originally.  Here, you can't judge a book by its cover.  Looking at this building you wouldn't want to go through into the courtyard.  Need paint, general clean-up.  Up three flights of bare wood stairs that haven't been redone in forty years, and into the most gorgeous apartment we've ever stayed in.  In our B&B in Warsaw, the room lacked heat----actually it didn't lack heat----it didn't have any.  Donna was able to cure her shin splints by pressing her leg against the wall during the night.  Here,we have heated marble floors in the bathroom.......for the same price...this morning we start to see krakow.