Author: Taran

Born into a middle-class English family, Taran was educated at a minor UK public-school and graduated from Imperial College, London as a mechanical engineer. He worked variously as a marine engineer, a marine surveyor, a company owner and as an industrial accidents investigator. He is a family man although now divorced from the mother of his two sons. He has travelled the world extensively, often as part of his employment, but also many times simply for the pleasure of experiencing new countries their cultures and their people. As well as calling England his home for much of his life, he is also a citizen of Canada where he lived for seventeen years and has had homes in Nigeria and Kuwait. Now retired, he lives in California, happily married to his second wife, and close to both his sons and his grandchildren. He continues to travel as often as possible and is enjoying his dream of becoming a writer.

AWNT: The “delights” of electronic storage

I am eternally grateful to my long-missed Dad for inculcating his young son with the importance of filing away letters; he kept every single letter that I wrote home during all my school, university and early professional life which gave me a definite leg-up as in recent years I started the process of putting my own memoir down on paper. I carried on that tradition as much as possible in view of the developing itinerant nature of my life, and it wasn’t until my life became intertwined with someone from my past who turned out to have a decidedly jealous and vindictive attitude towards me that a particular portion of that collection “mysteriously” disappeared. That incident apart, my belief in the strength and importance of maintaining a paper trail of one’s life remains as intransigent as ever.

It was with that thought in mind that I read about the recent failure of the American military to keep secrets under wraps when such secrets are transferred from paper filing systems that can very simply be effectively restricted to a carefully chosen few, into the ether that is the world of electronic and cloud storage that is increasingly becoming demonstrably flawed as a haven for information we would prefer to keep close to our chests. To discover that a very junior member of America’s armed forces, one who evidently has some considerable knowledge of IT, has been able to download secret documents, for which we assume he does not have security clearance, and then casually pass them on to a group of his buddies who have an interest in all things military, from playing games to collecting guns, is unbelievably scary.

A second, far more personal, incident that has just occurred in our home computing system is the accidental loss of all the e-mails that Safari/Google had stored in their archival systems of our two e-mail accounts. This was an “accident waiting to happen”, an oft-used term when I was investigating all sorts of industrial incidents during my pre-retirement work for UK’s Health and Safety Executive; that is all of the necessary elements for an unintended happening that would have undesirable results were present in the programming of the two mail applications. In the process of clearing unwanted e-mails that the system had stored under the heading “Archive”, one touch of the wrong button “All”, instantly despatched every single one of our e-mails into everlasting purgatory from which they can never return. The only person that can be blamed for the extreme nature of this sequence of events is the programme writer who failed to insert that simple little pop-up window that asks, “You are about to delete the entire contents of this file. Are you sure you want to continue with this action as it cannot be reversed?” a variation of which so many programmers, more sympathetic to the average home computer user’s skills, have deemed to be advisable.

And so dear readers, the sad but true lesson to be learned from both of these very sad but very true incidents is that we should tread with great care along any highway, street, road, country lane or grassy trail that may lull us into believing we are living in a world where our memories are safely stored in cloud heaven, when they are actually just fuel for the fires of hell and fodder for the taking of one and all.

Long live paper, pen and ink!!

PS: All the same, just commit this message to memory and please, don’t further damage the environment by printing it!

SFTF – When borders are just lines on a map.

Brexit has made me an alien in my chosen land, but today I have been pleasantly reminded why I used to enjoy being a European. The Lower Silesian Voivodeship is that part of Poland closest to The Czech Republic and none of it more so than the appendix-shaped lower half of Kłodsko County where all roads, bar those heading north-east, lead to the nearby Czechian border. The landscape here, on both sides of the border, is determined by Góry Stołowe, a range of low mountains that exhibit some extraordinarily beautiful rock formations created by the vagaries of nature working away for millions of years on the sandstone that is the bedrock of the area. Having already witnessed several examples of these magnificent rocky outcrops during our local peregrinations, Celine and I spent the day exploring a little further afield, crossing that border in a westerly direction to Teplice nad Metují, to see for ourselves what the Adršpach-Teplice Rocks had to offer.

Looking skywards at the impressive height of the old pines is enough to give you neck-ache!

One could wax lyrical in describing the grandeur of the massive rock walls, the sweetness of the spring water, the abundance of wild flowers, mosses, ferns and lichens, the tenacity of young trees clinging to stone spires high overhead, the tremendous height of old pines reaching up to the sky from the forest floor and the exhilaration of scaling three hundred steep steps to take in the panoramic views from Strmen, the remains of a medieval wooden and stone castle precariously located atop one of the narrow spires, founded by the Lords of Skalice to command valleys far below. That task however, I am leaving to the tourist literature, the purpose of today’s writing being to briefly share my initial feelings about neighbourliness and the importance of friendship between nation states.

With all that is presently taking place along the border lands between Russia and Ukraine it has become clear to all the world that there are some very wrong-minded people who believe that the geographical shape of a country should be determined by the language of the local populace. And it is all too obvious that there are many Russian speaking citizens of Ukraine who totally disagree with this notion. For hundreds of years, Eastern Europe has been the arena for land-grabbing ventures by speakers of many tongues and now comprises a hotch-potch of countries and an even greater melange of languages that totally defy the logic of the premise of one country one language; yes, each country has its official language but unilingualism as such is virtually extinct.

In a similar vein, crossing many politically determined European borders these days rarely results in an immediate feeling of entering another country; not only does one language diffuse gently into the other, the landscape changes but marginally, and all that one needs to contend with are slight differences in road signage and perhaps one or two traffic laws. Having a Polish speaking polyglot for a wife may be slightly influencing my point of view, but also opens my eyes about the comparability between many of the Slavic languages; even I was able to see a few similarities between Polish and Czechian as we scanned a cafe menu board deciding how to assuage our hunger at the end of a fairly bracing and ultimately tiring walk up and down the trails.

The comparisons don’t stop with the language. The ever-varying scenery of forest, lovingly husbanded farmland, wooded hills and grassy valleys, prominent village churches of differing Christian faiths and, sadly, the scars of war, political uncertainty and battered economies, are all to be found on both sides of the border. Everyone we meet and chat with on our wayfaring adventures is equally likely to show fellow friendliness, whatever their lingo and ethnicity and all share our love of nature and enthusiasm for the open-air lifestyle.

What more could we all want than for this sense of goodwill, bonhomie and border blindness to prevail throughout this troubled planet? What hope is there for humanity if the current self-serving hostilities, both military and economic, continue to prevail?

Nature showing us how to cooperate as new growth clings to rock faces everywhere . . .

. . . and cool spring water flows across the canyon floor

Dwarfed by nature’s handiwork, your tired scribe plods back along the boardwalk as he contemplates the sad state of the world!!

Settling into a new life in Poland

I may not understand much of the language but, with Celine as my patient but long-suffering guide, I am beginning to absorb an understanding of the Polish way of life. Very obviously this is not Southern California, something for which I am extremely grateful; it would be a fruitless exercise to start listing the thousand and one differences but let me just say that only a very few of them cause me/us any real anguish and settling into our new life has been almost without exception a delightful experience.

Our return here in the first week of April introduced us to a different aspect of airline travel when half-way across Middle America our Lufthansa jet had to make an emergency U-turn to take an ill passenger back to Denver; arriving very late in Frankfurt we had the unexpected “pleasure” of spending more than four hours getting to know the Business lounge in intimate detail, as we awaited the next connecting flight to Wroclaw. A side benefit of this delay was that instead of having to deal with the usual heavy afternoon traffic heading south along the busy E67, we had the road to ourselves as we headed home in the wee small hours.

A friendly greeting by the cold fluffy stuff!

The house had been gainfully occupied by various relatives during our short absence, but in the few days it had been empty before our arrival, the tail-end of winter had managed to effectively cool the building fabric back down to the point where our central heating boiler was hard pushed to make the place comfortable once again. However, whereas we had found ourselves very under-dressed during our unscheduled extended stay in the previous November, we had returned fully prepared with suitcases bulging with all the winter clothing we never used in Long Beach CA. Anyway, Spring was just around the corner and even though early April did produce the occasional smattering of soft fluffy snow, we were soon bathing in the glories of buds appearing on every shrub and tree, the bulbs we had planted very late in November pushing their noses out of the earth, and the sweet sounds of wild birds continuing to welcome the arrival of the March equinox.

Early signs of Spring . . . we both love paeonies.

To our Californian family and friends, we appeared to have been heading into a war zone, with Putin’s totally unjustifiable invasion of Poland’s neighbour Ukraine being in full swing, and we did admit to some slight concerns about the possible consequences of this unconscionable action. As I write, some 80+ days since the Ukrainians’ terrors began, the future course of European history remains very much in the balance, but on a local scale, life in this small corner of the world is generally carrying on as normal, although being a bit more costly.

Our attractive little town, nestling in a valley at the edge of Góry Bystrzyckie, a low mountain range that follows a small part of the border with Czechia, thrives mainly on its reputation as a health spa where numerous visitors come during the year to “partake of the [mineral] waters” and the many associated services and treatments on offer. The surrounding forests are also popular with hikers, mountain-bikers, and a few rock-climbers, all seeking venues that are free from mass tourism; indeed, just last weekend the forest tracks and trails with which we are slowly becoming familiar were the location for “Weekend Aktywności” with some nine hundred mountain bikers from all over the country competing in a muddy rock-strewn bike race on the Saturday, followed by a half-marathon foot race over similar conditions the following morning. However, in the main visitors restrict their physical activities to strolling and “Nordic walking” their way around the town’s parks and the more easily accessible trails, leaving the forest paths we enjoy the most to the birds and ourselves . . . and those like us.

One of the frustrations of living in any foreign country can be that of proving one’s residential status for anything from car ownership to obtaining insurance; in Poland one achieves this by obtaining a PESEL number, PESEL being the Polish acronym for “Universal Electronic System for Registration of the Population”, something that every citizen obtains automatically. In my case, being a complete alien thanks to Brexit, but lucky enough to be staying in the country on an extended visa, this needed to be applied for at the local municipal office, and now that I have achieved this exalted rank I am starting to feel like a genuine “local”. Such feelings do of course come with their own added responsibilities, some resulting from being homeowners and some from a desire to see oneself as a responsible citizen, adding up to a comfortable sense of “belonging”.

Some of nature’s amazing rock sculptures we see on our regular hikes

As I write in the last week of May, the wet stuff is descending from an unusually grey sky, unusual to us insofar as we have had such “beautiful” weather this Spring. Realistically though, a bit of rain was much needed and is very welcome in every way; the garden will become more exuberant than ever and our attention to all the plants and shrubs we have found in our new garden that are giving us so much joy, will continue to be duly rewarded. One occupant of the garden is not quite so welcome however, a fearsome extremely fast growing terror called Japanese Knotweed; for some strange reason this “aggressive and invasive weed” is well established in the neighbourhood and has been the bane of my life ever since we decided one small corner of our garden, once cleared, would be ideal for planting some currant bushes; three weeks later I am hoping my deep digging has eliminated the beast but having read further on the subject I am not optimistic.

One of the biggest hurdles that face me personally is to get a firm grip on the Polish language; I will admit to having been supremely lazy about this potential problem ever since, ten years ago, I assured my then bride-to-be that “ . . . of course I will [learn Polish], it can’t be that difficult!!” How wrong could I be?? And it is only thanks to my live-in interpreter that I can tell you how easy our transition to life here in Lower Silesia has been. Polish is complicated for the English speaker, as I understand the reverse is also true. We both have combinations of letters that have their own special sound, or no sound at all: think of the many ways “ough” is pronounced in English; Polish “drz” sounds like English “j”, “c” is pronounced like “ts” in “cats”, “ci” like “ch” in “chats”, and unlike us lazy Anglos, Poles pronounce every single syllable, and that is just the start of this Anglophile’s problems. Brung up to speak proper, and introduced to Le Francais at a tender age, I found many similarities existed between my own tongue and that of the predominantly Latin-based languages, and I could begin to guess the meaning of many foreign words; that is until I started to learn Polish. Anyway – big breath – I am persevering, and I am at last beginning to be able to pick out the odd word here and there as I listen to the radio or to Celine chatting with our new local friends, and I can exchange basic pleasantries with check-out ladies and waitresses, so I won’t starve. I will persevere . . . I promise!

To all intents and purposes, our new home is fully and comfortably furnished, we have our own set of wheels, a five-year old, strangely-named Opel Mokka 4×4 imported from Austria, tucked safely away in the garage each night, the garden keeps me out of mischief whilst trying hard to give me backache and afternoon tea on the terrace is a regular pleasure. I have a man-cave/garden shed/workshop to satisfy my inner need to potter and fiddle around, and Celine has her studio to pursue her artistic aspirations. Shopping can be a local walk down the hill to Biedronka where we gratify our every gustatory requirement; or it can be a more serious outing with a short drive through countryside that never fails to make me smile, to the Carrefour hypermarket, often accompanied by a foray into Leroy-Merlin next door, another French enterprise that fulfils most of our hardware needs. And when either of these activities results in minor hunger pangs there is always somewhere nearby to sit and enjoy a decent cup of coffee and to share a generous slice of “szarlotka” or “makowiec”. To say we are content would be the ultimate understatement. Long may our satisfaction with life in Poland continue.

Post script . . . the air is so fresh after the rain and rhododendron season in our local park is simply beautiful . . .

SFTF – Feathering the new nest.

Soft white snowflakes are drifting gently down from a grey sky and brightening every branch, twig, dead leaf and blade of grass they alight upon. It is the end of November, the beginning of winter, and the second seasonal change we have experienced since our arrival in Poland in an early August summer. Growing up in countries where four defined seasons created a regular pattern in our lives, we have both been deprived in recent years of the wonders each change brought with it, and now we feel like kids again. It is as if, at last, the final piece of the jigsaw has fallen into place.

Finally . . . a nesting place with four well-defined seasons!!

Finding somewhere that we feel totally comfortable calling it “home”, after years of travelling to new pastures vainly scanning the windows of real estate agents and even getting to seriously consider a few of the offerings, is like opening the first page of a new book and just knowing one will read it effortlessly to the final word. After nearly two months sleeping beneath our new-found roof, we have finished reading the introduction, have raced through the preface and are most definitely ready to start on chapter one.

Metaphorical preliminaries over, I must admit the process has not been easy for me, an alien in a foreign land, unable to spout more than the most basic of conversational phrases, and totally reliant on Celine to carry all the burden of sorting through the bureaucracy that a house purchase entails. Nothing happened in quite the same way that it would have done “back home”, whatever home means to this wanderer who has spread his domestic life throughout England, Nigeria, Kuwait, Canada, England again and finally nine years in Southern California. The one constant factor of all those resting places was language, and now even that old stalwart has let me down. And all the while that we went searching for a nesting place “somewhere in Europe” we had both legally been “Europeans”, and of course that accursed Brexit has now made me an alien there as well. So that is yet another hurdle for me to overcome.

The day we first viewed the place that has now become home – first-, second- or only-home has yet to be decided – it was a fine sunny afternoon. We had breakfasted in our AirBnB digs a couple of hundred yards further up the hill, sharing our mealtime with a young deer feasting in the forest outside the kitchen window, and felt we were in paradise.
We walked down to the address and, being “american,” our first surprise was to find that not the realtor, but the owner was going to show us around. This is not the best way to give a dwelling the once over, for whatever you start to look at closely, be it a dodgy looking electrical socket or cobweb-filled cupboard in the basement, the owner immediately tries to offer an explanation or else to distract you by pointing to some more wholesome detail of her “wonderful home” on which she has of course spent a fortune in renovations. One thing that had made the on-line description extra enticing, was that the house was “fully furnished” and indeed there were a lot of very desirable items of furniture throughout; however it was not long into the visit that “Pani Householder” – formal Polish always uses the title Pani or Pan when addressing anyone other than good friends or family – started to offer various significant pieces, items that we later realised, were simply too big to be moved into her new smaller apartment, at “much less than she had paid for them,” or words to that effect, and things that she simply didn’t consider to be of much value she would “gift to [us]” because we were “such nice people”.

However, there were so many upsides to what we saw that first day that although we swore to each other that we would definitely not pay the list price unless all of the furniture was included, we realised that the house ticked nearly every box for us and we did eventually come to an acceptable agreement and after some partially successful bargaining we did end up with enough basic furniture to be adequately comfortable and were not quite as much out of pocket as the owner might have originally desired.

For a long time, our house-buying mantra had included a view of either water or hills, and to satisfy my own rather greedy list of wants, a dog and a dock, a garden and a garage. While we may not have achieved total satisfaction – I’m afraid the dog is out of the question until we stop travelling altogether and I had already abandoned the dock idea after a six month trial period of being a boat owner in SoCal – but we do have a view of forest and the local park, we live in the foothills of Gory Stolowe, we have a small garden with enough leaves to rake up each year to make a healthy supply of compost, a garage big enough to keep the snow off our rental car and the added bonus of a smaller “garage” that will, in due course, become a very satisfactory “man-cave” (US) or “garden shed” (UK).

Buying what is certainly, for the time being at least, a second-home entails a lot more thought than simply moving house along with everything that one already owns, as one is obliged to think like newly-weds furnishing their first home from scratch. So we made long lists of our basic needs, and then made trips to the nearest hardware store – Leroy-Merlin in Klodsko, a few kilometres away – and the inevitable long drive to the nearest IKEA in Wroclaw, where, after making a bevy of bedding purchases, we realised their standard bed sizes are slightly different from the European norm, not enough to be a real problem, but somewhat irritating to the uninitiated.

Finally, just five weeks and two days after our first viewing, the day arrived when we could collect the key to the door and really call the place home. And that was when the fun really began. Up until that day all our plans and suppositions about what would need to be put where had been just ideas in our heads, all the little jobs that we knew had to be done were simply a list in our new home’s notebook, and suddenly, we found ourselves hard at work. All day and practically everyday since, our new nest has been a hive of non-stop activity and as the remains of autumn passed us by and winter arrived, we realise we have not once been for a walk in the glorious woods above the town that we had so enjoyed when we first arrived in this pretty little spa town. As we started into one job after another, Leroy-Merlin practically became a second – or should that be third? – home, whilst we almost became part of the family at another French conglomerate, the hypermarket Carrefour, that was handily next door.

Now some two months later, there are no more empty picture hooks on the wall, let alone the ugly scars that accompanied them, new lights have been hung from ceiling fittings that were just bare wires upon our arrival, pockets of someone else’s old rubbish have been grubbed out and consigned to the dumpster, and cobwebs and their occupants no longer greet us at every turn; our inherited garden rake has been gainfully employed removing numerous barrow loads of the aforementioned leaves, our shrubs, grapevines and strawberry canes are now cosily hibernating beneath leafy mulch and half a dozen bags of same are ready to start off the compost heap in the spring. Celine has been scrutinising the net rigorously and every room is furnished appropriate to its purpose, as cosy rugs take root everywhere and the local delivery persons become our friends.

But as much as we feel truly “at home” in our new abode, our return “back home” to SoCal is imminent. There are so many aspects of our lives needing to be re-organised as we decide exactly how to live with this somewhat un-planned situation, that I can see the next few weeks and months being even busier than the last! I just hope I can still find time for some writing.

February in SoCal has arrived before I ever had a chance to post the above thoughts on our new life and the intervening two months have indeed proved to be just as busy as predicted. As soon as we arrived back in this “neck of the woods” or, more accurately, “pleasant little corner of suburbia”, there being no woods whatsoever in our immediate vicinity to compare with those we so recently left behind, we started thinking about all the things – cold weather clothing, “can’t do without” kitchen utensils, family heirloom crockery, useful handtools unused for years and yet so needed in our new home, and an extraordinary variety of odds and ends that would personalize and add extra cosiness – thereby creating yet another unforeseen problem, just how much should we consign away to our as yet only partly proven new life, and how were we going to ship it all? I even gave unwarranted consideration to the somewhat hairbrained idea of shipping our hybrid Kia o’er the pond, packed to the gills with our “household effects”, but a little research quickly indicated the practicality “cons” enormously outweighed the “pros” of such a rash manoeuvre.

Christmas festivities and slight health problems associated to my way of thinking with the change of environment, came and went and the New Year arrived, signalling that one quarter of our breathing space was gone without any decisions being made. Most importantly, I had to face up to the reality that my new status as an alien in our new European homeland, required some serious action to ensure our planned seven-month long return visit was not going to be upset by my only being in possession of the basic 90-day visa that comes with the territory of non-EU travellers. It has taken me much of the last month to bring together all that is needed to apply for a Polish National D-Type visa and having finally received that all-important document, this, dear readers, is where I shall close this post. Here’s hoping our eternal optimism bears fruit and we shall soon be on our travels gain, though this time, with the objective of completing the feathering of our new nest.

SFTF – Search no more, the future has been found!!

Autumn came early to Poland this year – it arrived in August!- and we have been loving every minute of it in the weeks since. That might not be the way we had expected to end this odyssey when we started out nine years ago and I would not be surprised to hear the odd gasp of surprise from those in the know. Sunny climes were a common factor of nearly all the stopovers we explored, a degree of the exotica appeared more than once and well known tourist destinations displayed their somewhat hackneyed attractions with predictable regularity, yet none of them could satisfy the eclectic needs of this particular couple.

Two years ago we were reaching the end of a year’s sabbatical away from the traveling ethos and starting to get itchy feet once more, eager to continue the search for the elusive new nesting site, when the world so rudely became one enormous no-travel zone and we were set back on our haunches, dumbfounded by this uncalled-for interruption in our long term plans as we reconsidered our campaign. Had we been looking in the wrong places, or with the wrong objectives? And where now could we safely go in the face of this rampant virus?

Reality finally hit home when emotional ties were seen to be missing from our location desirables list. As the old saying goes there is no place like home and home to both of us was somewhere in Europe’s more northerly climes. My English roots had offered me little permanent solace in a couple of previous lives and, as lovely as England can be, my homeland was definitely not a “third-time lucky” option; which left Poland, a country I had visited and enjoyed four or five times in my life and, more importantly, was the much-loved, ever-welcoming homeland of my better half. As travel restrictions wound down, over optimistically as it turns out, we jumped at the opportunity to be flying again and by the end of one busy weekend in Southern California’s early summer we had a detailed itinerary taking us close to siblings, nephews, nieces and friends, had taken full advantage of AirBnB’s easy booking system, and had return flights booked with LOT, our destination’s national airline; by the first week in August we were aloft once more.

This was always going to be a trip with a difference, a mixture of tourism, renewing old acquaintances, catching up with family and, maybe, a bit of light-hearted real estate research without expectations. We started with a week of restful self-indulgence in the small historic town of Kazimierz-Dolny, beautifully located on the bank of the Vistula river, a couple of hours drive south-east of Warsaw. Celine had found a secluded retreat for us at the top of the hill above the town, in a converted farm building hidden away at the end of an unpaved track surrounded by trees, with nothing to disturb us but the sounds of nature. The town is a bit of a tourist attraction with the usual Polish attributes of a rynek (town square) surrounded by elegant old buildings, some dating back to the town’s seventeenth and eighteenth-century trading heydays, a couple of handsome churches, the remains of a castle high up on a bluff overlooking the river and surrounding countryside, and, during our visit, a film festival. Our second day there was a Friday, market day, with the cobble-stoned rynek turned into a wonderland of wizened country folk selling their freshly picked home-grown produce; we eagerly stocked up on tomatoes, apples, farmers’ cheese, milk, raspberries, blackberries and blueberries, lettuce, cucumbers, eggs, basil, garlic, fennel and honey, the fresh produce damp from the fields and smelling delicious. For Celine it was all wonderfully reminiscent of her childhood and for me a revelation after spending so many years on both sides of the Atlantic in a predominantly single-use plastic world.

Then followed nearly three weeks flitting hither and thither as we renewed family ties, starting in the small village of Zbytowa where we had a taste of the country life a few miles east of Wroclaw. Poland, like most of Europe, has seen a movement away from the land as younger people, disillusioned by the lack of prospects in small villages, choose to live in the cities, and farming has become more highly mechanised than ever. But even though the small strip farms and smallholdings that I remembered from earlier visits now seem to be in the minority, the country remains very agricultural with rolling fields and woods and forests delighting the eye mile after mile. The side of our family that we stayed with in Zbytowa is lucky enough to combine the benefits of gainful employment with an established international manufacturer and life in the country as part of a close-knit farming family; so maybe we did not truly experience the countryside existence, but daily walks in the local woods, picking wild blackberries and snuffling out the occasional edible mushroom, quickly started to work their magic.

Our next short journey took us along highway 8, one of Poland’s major traffic arteries between the capital, Warsaw, and south-west across the border with Czech Republic and as the E67, eventually to Prague. I am finding driving in Poland to be mostly a pleasure, once one is clear of the major cities which are under heavy pressure from a glut of private cars, the result of an increasingly healthy economy, whilst on the main highways one meets an armada of articulated eighteen-wheel lorries, providing the transportation element of today’s logistics-oriented distribution systems. And as good as the highways are for normal driving, their two lanes were never designed to accommodate such heavy traffic which can at times turn an enjoyable ride through lovely countryside into a tiresome ordeal. As for the manners of one’s fellow drivers, they are generally very courteous, and rarely show anything like the road-rage to which I have become accustomed on Southern California’s freeways; lane discipline is strictly maintained, and apart from the occasional over-zealous young blood proving his manhood at the slightest opportunity to overtake, drivers more often than not are happy to simply “go with the flow.”

Our third stopover offered a completely different view of this historic nation, as we spent four days staying in a very modern apartment overlooking the Oder River on the edge of the beautiful old city of Wroclaw which was the setting for my travelling companion’s university years. Wandering though old haunts, meeting up with friends and reminiscing about the good times one had in one’s youth are especially welcome when not faced with too much change, and Wroclaw is a city that takes great pride in it’s heritage. The city centre is extensively pedestrianised, making slow meanders through the beautifully restored Old Town a pleasure to be contemplated at a leisurely pace; and for the gourmand, café’s and restaurants abound giving ample opportunity to sample the delicious offerings of the typical Polish kitchen.

Over the next couple of weeks, our digs became somewhat less salubrious and even though we were still in August, early signs of autumn, the occasional rain shower and cool breezes, revealed a need to rectify the summer-oriented focus of our travel wardrobes. Visiting family in towns that are off the tourist beat, meant a much smaller choice of holiday rentals and a lot less luxury than our Wroclaw pad had provided. However this is not a reflection on the attractiveness of the towns themselves, as pockets of history and fine architecture are to be found in every Polish city and town, even if at times such gems can be visually overwhelmed by the depressing sameness of Communist era blocks of flats, built with good intent but without any attempt at aesthetic design. For convenience of its location, we stayed in one of those tiny flats ourselves, furnished cheap IKEA style to look sleek and modern, with the almost unique addition for that neighbourhood of a somewhat redundant windowsill-mounted A/C unit; but the four-storey tramp up the concrete staircase revealed the sad heritage of the building’s thoughtless design.

Living or staying in any of the old towns of the Sudety, the south-eastern corner of modern Poland close to the border with the Czech Republic, one is never far from from the countryside which becomes more and more beautiful as the flatter farmland to the north gives way to rolling hills and the distant mountains come closer; and to continue the historical theme, old castles and chateaux are there aplenty, along with more modern attractions such as the early twentieth century spa towns in the foothills where this particular episode of our travels comes to an end.

Spending a few days in a spa town, partaking of the mineral-rich health-giving waters both internally and externally, taking vigorous hikes in the forest and being massaged and pampered in the calming atmosphere of one’s chosen “pensjonat” is a curative for many an ailment, and here in Poland can even be prescribed by your family doctor. When we first arrived in Polanica-Zdroj nearly three months ago, the popularity of the small town’s offerings were immediately evident from the large numbers of “persons of advancing years” strolling purposefully through Park Zdrojowy, many suitably armed with a pair of Nordic walking poles, rather as if the town was one huge retirement home. We, however, were not guests of one of the many elegant old villas dotted around the edge of that fine green space, but short term residents of a well-restored second floor apartment in a fine old villa tucked away at the edge of the forest, yet still only a ten-minute stroll down into the centre of the action, and appropriately described in my travel journal as “probably the best AirBnB we have stayed in to date”, high praise indeed considering all the beautiful places our wanderings have taken us over the past several years.

Taking life easy was a real necessity after the hectic three weeks of catching up with all the family and friends, and this “village” of some six thousand souls was just the place for it. As we relaxed with a welcome cup of tea in one of the verandahs enjoying the evening sunshine and watching the noisy antics of a couple of European jays playing among the leaves of the linden, birch, maple, rowan and pine trees surrounding our new pad, the worries of the world seemed blissfully far away. All the same we never expected to be so lucky as to find our new nest just a couple of hundred yards away for that is exactly what would happen in the coming weeks and explains why, after days and days of nestbuilding and far too few days of finding time to enjoy all that our new homeland has to offer, we find ourselves still in Poland nearly three months later. But that is another story for the next, and possibly last episode of “Searching For The Future”; definitely the moment to give my writing time back to “Are We Nearly There”!