Auschwitz-Birkenau is a dark and gloomy place of remembrance on the most beautiful of days but on an overcast cold November day you get the extra layer of chills and goosebumps thinking of the atrocities that have taken place there some 80 years ago. Phil and I traveled there early in the morning to catch…
Category: Travel
Turkey Time
I figured since it’s almost that turkey time of the year in the U.S., I’d recap our never-before-written-about short vacation to the country of Turkey back in October of 2020. The trip in 2020 wasn’t our first visit to Turkey, it was our third to be exact, but this one was the one we were…
Czech Hiking
Špindlerův Mlýn is a ski resort town in the northern Czech Republic. It is also only a 3-hour drive from Wroclaw making it an ideal ski town come winter or a great weekend hike destination anytime there isn’t snow on the ground. Ania managed to get a full weekend off from work so we made…
Peruvian Adventure
We knew that Peru was going to be our vacation destination this year since January of 2019. That is when we did an extensive plane ticket search and eventually bought our flights. And that was it for many weeks to come. Somehow we couldn’t get around to planning the rest of the trip beyond landing…
The Other Side of the Owl
We’ve been to the local Owl Mountains a few times in the past, but we’ve mostly hit the same trails since we simply didn’t know any better. So when the weather forecast called for a super sunny and warm day this past Saturday, we knew that we had to spend that day outdoors, but we…
The Tough Guy Challenge
The Tough Guy Challenge began a few years back on the eve of the International Women’s Day. As the story goes, my buddy Robert and his then-roommate were asked to leave the flat so that the girls could celebrate their day by having a girls night in. Unfortunately for these guys, they came home too…
Snow Hiking
The Big Owl mountain is only 1,015m above sea level (3,330feet) but it is fairly nearby and it has a cool lighthouse looking observation tower built in 1906 atop of it. Whenever we feel like getting out of the house to do some moderate snow hiking, the Big Owl is our go-to destination. The views…
The 10-Year Challenge – A Retrospective
I’m turning 37 years old tomorrow. Yikes! And while I haven’t really thought about it too much before, for some reason this year I’m approaching that 37-year mark with a little more caution. Maybe it’s just me getting wiser, or so I hope anyway, but I did spend the last couple of evenings reminiscing of…
My 2018 – A Google Photos Review
I’m a big fan of Google Photos. Even though I should probably be an Apple Photos person, given my Apple hardware usage, somehow Google Photos was first to the punch for me with cloud-based photo storage and it just stuck. I especially love how all my photos from my phone, computer, camera, and even sent…
Dresden Christmas Market 2018 Edition
In case you missed my write up of the Dresden Christmas Market last year, we went back this year to do it all over again. Mostly because Ania loves Christmas a lot, but perhaps also because we really missed that cheese and mushroom hot sandwich they serve there. Again, it’s only a three-hour drive at…
The Long Way Back – Przemyśl, Łańcut, and Sandomierz
While our Transalp test ride was mainly geared towards the Bieszczady area of south-east Poland, we had scheduled our return path a little differently to cover more of the unknown. Having never been to the cities of Przemyśl, Łancut, or Sandomierz, we decided to do a quick drive by, even if for a minute. First…
Transalping Around – Bieszczady Edition
The idea behind getting back into riding the Transalp was to do at least one epic run a season. Now the jury is still out on what exactly would deem a ride ‘epic’, but right away my imagination started running wild. Romania, Bulgaria, Croatia, no, screw that, Albania! It’s all just a few thousand kilometers…
A Day in Cracow
Back in March, we took a quick day trip to Cracow or Kraków in Polish. It’s only a 275km (168miles) ride, and it’s all highway all the way there. Without a specific plan or city tour in mind, we simply started walking all around admiring this great city. Ohh, and of course Fado came along,…
Saxon Switzerland
“Wait. You went to Switzerland? In Germany?” Yes. And no. Let me explain. Saxon Switzerland is a national park around the Elbe river valley south-east of Dresden, Germany. In 1766 two Swiss artists were appointed to the Dresden Academy of Arts, and in their letters back home they described their new place of residence as…
Burg Stolpen
I seem to have a pretty weird luck when it comes to renting Airbnb flats for us and our dog Fado. A few years back I found a place on the Polish seaside that turned out to be a murder crime scene some years earlier. In San Francisco, I found a great apartment smack in…
Snow Hike
Even though we’re about halfway through January as of this writing, winter has been pretty modest for us in Wroclaw thus far. The temperatures have hardly dipped below freezing, snow is almost none existent, and I even rode my scooter to work a couple of times. In January! So today, on a tip from Ania’s…
Dresden Christmas Market
Speaking of Dresden… There are quite a few things that took place between our trip to Dresden in August and today, but since today’s story also deals with Dresden, I’ll just write about it now. Today, however, the temperature was hovering around freezing, it snowed at one point, and most important difference of all, we…
Dresden Fado Walking
Dresden is only a three-hour drive from Wrocław, but we had a long weekend to kill this past August, so we spent a couple of nights in East Germany to make the most of it. Naturally, Fado, our chocolate Labrador, had to come with, so I ran a quick Airbnb search for a place that…
Cape Town Impressions
I didn’t really get much time to do any touristy stuff while in Cape Town this past weekend. I suppose it would have made total sense to extend my stay at least a day or two to check out local sights, but the trip itself was sort of a last minute thing and I didn’t…
PMI in South Africa
This past weekend had quite a lot going for it and I’ll try to do my best to explain my sudden South Africa Instagram photo shooting. First, I was invited to participate in item writing by Project Management Institute, a certification body behind my PMP certificate. Second, I was flown by PMI all the way…
The Polish Magician 