My crazy trip to Poland and why airlines suck

This was quite a while ago, but in August 2013 I went on a road trip to Kraków (Cracow) in southern Poland. The problem was how to get there. Easy! Just jump on a plane and go... well, no, there is no way in hell I was going to fly. I last flew in 1998 (I was 14) and with my severely bent spine (scoliosis) it was an absolute nightmare then and I've got a lot weaker since then. If you're in a wheelchair the only way to fly is to be transferred to a normal seat and your wheelchair and other equipment put in with the luggage. I can't really sit without my special seat, but that was in the hold, so I used pillows for support. But I was in a big tour group of other disabled people so we had to wait for all of them and all the rest of the passengers, and again in reverse at the other end in Tenerife, which was a four-hour flight from Gatwick. At the end I was in such pain that I just thought "never, ever again" and I have never flown since. Come on airlines! It's 2014 - can't you come up with something better for severely disabled people like me? I guess it would not be profitable, right? Anyway, I wasn't going to Poland by train either, because I had a hoist and commode chair and besides, I needed a wheelchair adapted van when I got to Poland. So we rented one from the UK and drove the 1000 miles (1600km) to Kraków!  I decided that, since I had only one driver (a friend of one of my carers), I needed to stop for two nights on the way and two on the way back. That was the crazy part - six days of travelling for a five-night stay in Kraków. I couldn't really make the whole trip much longer either. Fortunately I have a good friend in western Germany and another good friend in Dresden in the east, so I arranged to meet up with them on the way there and the way back. I actually stayed two nights in Dresden on the way, so I had a chance to walk through part of the Old Town and along the river Elbe with my friend. I had been there before in 2006 and they have done a really good job of restoring the many of the old bits that the Allies destroyed on those tragic nights in 1945. It's a surprisingly nice place, except that sandstone is not an ideal building material - it erodes and turns black really fast. On to Poland...

In 2006 I briefly went across the border into Poland at Görlitz/Zgorzelec and it was so run-down and the customs officials at the border (they are gone now because of free movement in the EU) looked almost Soviet - As far as I was concerned, I might as well have been in the middle of Russia! However this time we went across the border on the motorway (Autobahn/autostrada) and everything was modern and smooth and disappointingly normal and boring until Kraków. After having some fun listening to the GPS navigation lady trying to pronounce Polish street names, we got to the Ibis hotel, which was quite central, by the Vistula (Wisła) river and near Wawel Castle.

Day One - Kraków Old Town and Kazimierz

I was dropped at the Main Market Square (Rynek Główny) and was struck not only by the grandeur and beauty but by the smoothness of the paving - it was smoother for my chair than any other old town I've been to, anywhere. I was in heaven, apart from the fact I was in a province of International Tourist Land with all the living statues and souvenir stalls and crap like that. But apart from that it was very nice. I went inside St. Mary's Basilica (Kościół Mariacki) and then on through the small square (Mały Rynek) to Planty - a green, leafy walk round the edge of the Old Town, where the town walls once stood. Later we went to Kazimierz, the old Jewish part of town named after King Casimir (Kazimierz) III. It was a bit more bumpy and less attractive, but I had a brief look in the old cemetery and then we made good use of my portable-ish metal ramps to get into an Israeli restaurant for a meal. There aren't many Jews living there now, but these days it's quite a thriving tourist area with many Jewish restaurants. The film Schindler's List was partly filmed there.

Cloth hall (Sukiennice)	St Mary's Basilica (Kościół Mariacki)

Day Two - Wawel and Kościuszko's Mound

After one of my carers had left for Zakopane to get the permit for the next day's trip to the mountains, which had failed to arrive on time by post, I went along the riverbank to Wawel Castle. We spent some time finding the way to get in, which turned out to be by car, but inside the walls I found it very smooth and nicely restored. Unfortunately, none of the castle's interior was wheelchair-accessible, nor was the cathedral, but I had a good look around the beautiful renaissance courtyard and the outside of the buildings, which were in various architectural styles. I accidentally posed for a photo next to Pope John Paul II's statue, which irritated me slightly, but what can you do? It's Poland.  Later we drove to Kościuszko's Mound (Kopiec Kościuszki) and had a go at climbing the spiral path to the top, but it was steep and bumpy and too scary to go up more than halfway. It's funny because the buildings around the mound look fortified and quite old, but there are antennae and dishes on top, because RFM radio station broadcasts from there.

Me in distance going to Wawel Hill

Day Three - High Tatra Mountains and Zakopane

We drove off at 6.30 am and headed south. We had to get to the Tatra National Park no later than 9 because any private cars with a permit have to arrive before that time. From the car park there was a two-hour trek up the road to the lake, Morskie Oko, so obviously I needed to take the van up there. Unfortunately we had picked the wrong day (a public holiday), so the road was already super-busy, but despite the crowds the lake and mountains were stunning and the weather was beautiful and warm for 1300 metres (4500 ft) above sea-level. We all sat by the tourist chalet in the sunshine, looking at the lake and mountains, which rise about 1000 metres above the lake. We had a strange brunch there of oscypek smoked cheese, sour cabbage, potatoes and szarlotka - an apple cake, which is served a lot in the Polish Tatras. I went down the road for a while and breathed the mountain air before we drove down to a town called Zakopane, which is used as a base for skiers and hikers. The buildings, even the new ones, are all in this wooden Tatra mountain-chalet-style, but to be honest it's really just a dump, full of shops and eating places and tourist crap like traditionally-dressed idiots walking around for artificial historical effect. This pretty disgusting oscypek cheese that looks like a fat penis was being sold almost every ten metres and I was happy to get back to Krakow's Old Town, have a meal (in a Georgian restaurant as it happened) and see Kraków by night. Wow, Kraków was even more magical at night, with lamps lighting up the gothic, baroque and renaissance structures. Wonderful place.

Morskie Oko	Fat penises for sale!

Day Four - Bar Mleczny and Wieliczka Salt Mine

First we went for a walk somewhere between the hotel and Wawel, but sort of failed and ended up going up a main road really far before having a chance to cross in my chair. We had some very cheap lunch at a 'bar mleczny' (literally 'milk bar'), which is a really cheap kind of café that has provided meals for workers and the poor from the early 20th century until today - it was pretty much the only place in Communist times.  The atmosphere is more like a public toilet than a café and they often don't have everything (like... tea in my case. What kind of place runs out of tea?!), but the food is traditional Polish like bigos, barszcz, pierogi, kasza and pork schnitzel and it's super-cheap, like 5 zlotys (around £1) per meal. Then we headed for Wieliczka, which is almost a suburb of Kraków, and famous for its huge, centuries-old salt mine.  We took a massive wrong turn and nearly missed the last tour of the day, and then to our horror discovered that the lift down to the mine was slightly too small for my chair. However, we'd come so far and we were so determined to get down there that we actually removed my tray and an armrest or two from the chair and yanked me into that damn lift. Well, it was literally awesome down there - we went along tunnels and into big chambers and past a big pool of saltwater and even into a real, functioning cathedral where almost everything was carved out of the rock salt, even the chandeliers. We were taken into a huge dining room, which is used for functions and guests of the hotel they have down there!  It was rather like the villain's underground lair in a Bond movie. The air in the mine was cold and dry and, although I loved that place, I was quite relieved to get back to the surface, put my chair back together and feel comfortable again before our long journey back to England.

Rock-salt statues carved by miners

Smuggling ourselves into Germany... and a very odd restaurant

We set off early, which was useful because the Polish autostrada sucks like in France, where you have to join a traffic jam in order to pay at the toll gates. At the German border a police van overtook us and went in front of us. A message in its rear window flashed up saying "Willkommen in Deutschland!" - such friendly Germans! No, it actually said "Folge mir" ("Follow me"), so we followed them to a place off the road and they asked us questions like "Do you smoke?". They looked at our passports and had a look in the van and, instead of a van-load of cigarettes and drugs, they found three Poles, me and a load of equipment and luggage - they let us go almost immediately... and they never found the heroin I had stuffed under my chair. No, there was no heroin really. We still arrived in Dresden sooner than expected, despite all this, and we met up with my friend and her boyfriend. He suggested a restaurant near the station called Schwerelos (Effortless). Wow, what a funny place! The food was good, but nothing really exotic. What was exotic, however, was that you ordered with one of four tablet computers that were connected to your table, and the food came on rails, rather like a rollercoaster. It was effortless more for the staff than the diners, though, because they just sent the plates and pots of food by rollercoaster, for you to serve.
The next day we drove to Aachen near Belgium and had a meal with my other German friend and his parents. The day after that, after getting lost in Aachen's streets and parking next to a church instead of the Cathedral, which we were looking for, we headed for the Eurotunnel in Calais and arrived home that evening.

So, thanks to the airlines and the general complications associated with being severely disabled, I had just spent eleven days going to Poland for five nights, and taken three people with me, which was not cheap even staying at "budget" Ibis hotels. However, I reasoned that instead of staying at home, I had been there, travelled by road so had seen more stuff on the way, met up with friends and probably had the best trip of my life so far.