DAY FIVE
Ta Daaahhhh Let’s see how much work I can finish here.
So at the end of the night before, after the dancers danced and food was eaten and wine drank and the guests all filed off to bed for the night, Kaitlyn and I headed out to the back courtyard to prep a little for the next morning. I got all the snack baskets out and put them in a neat pile to the side of the courtyard so it would be easy to grab them and set them up the next morning. I went through all the vans and collected all the guests’ water bottles and threw them all in a garbage bag, then put that on top of the snack bins. I figured that I could set all the bottles out next to the water so it would be easy for the guests to fill them up.
We then went to bed.
So the morning of day five started and we were out of the room by seven AM. Kaityln worked on the picnic spread and I got all the snack bins out and made a big old snack table. The guests would come out, make a picnic and a snack bag, then get on a bus that we had contracted to take them to the hike. Liam would take the luggage to the next hotel and then take the afternoon off. I would take the other van to the start of the hike, do the hike with the guests, then drive the van to the next hotel.
I finished the snack table, and set up a water table, then went to grab the bag filled with water bottles…which wasn’t where I had left it the night before.
Huh.
I looked around for a while. I looked in the vans. I looked in the trailer. I checked around the courtyard. Kaityln noticed that I had been looking for a while and asked me for what.
“oh-nothing!” I said cheerfully. It was dawning on me that that bag had every single water bottle that we had. 25 guests were going on an all day hike in the middle of the summer, and we had no water bottles. I began to search sort of frantically. I went in to talk to my friend, the front desk lady of the Hotel U Leva.
I explained to her that we had a “bag” filled with “all of our water bottles” that we “really, really needed” and did she know anything about their disappearance?
She had no idea what I was talking about.
I gave up and went to talk to the Janitor, wondering if he had thought the bag was trash and thrown it out.
He had no idea what I was talking about.
Soon I was in the kitchen, vigorously gesturing to a small crowd of U Leva employees about what had happened, doing a drinking gesture to show that I was talking about water bottles. One of the Janitors suddenly brightened up.
“Ahha!” He said. He left the room.
Oh god yes!
He came back into the room and gave me a glass of water.
Fuck.
I ran back outside. The guests were packing lunches and snack bags. Some of them asked me where their water bottles were – they wanted to fill them before they got on the bus? After a hurried conference with Kaitlyn, we told them that we would fill the water bottles at the start of the hike. Kaityln left on the bus with the guests and I took one of the vans on a wild quest for water. I ended up at a gas station and ran in.
“I NEED WATER!” I said, way too loudly, and got a small team of gas station employees to help me carry 50 bottles of Aquafina into my van. I then drove like a wildebeest to the hike start.
The guests were waiting there and were getting sort of grumpy. I jumped out of the van, ran to where they were gathered, climbed up on top of a picnic table, and told them that the water bottles had been stolen.
They stared at me, dumbfounded.
I told them that I had Aquafina for everyone, and we would find replacement bike water bottles for the next day for everyone.
This satisfied everybody, and they took water and left on the hike.
We wound up into the mountains, almost losing four guests on the way (I only found them on accident as I was headed to the bathroom) but the hike was smashing and elegant and we rose into the peaks of the Tetras and overlooked waterfalls and the air was crisp in our lungs and returned to the bus.
I rode in the bus with the guests and Kaityln drove to six different bike shops over the course of two hours and purchased some fifty bike water bottles, a few of which looked suspiciously like a penis.
That evening Kaityln and I worked on bikes until the sun went down. The guests were having an “at your leisure night” at the Hotel Kolowrat (the one that I had forgotten to tip the porters at the week before) and Kaitlyn and I were just going to grab dinner in the bar.
On our way up to the room, we passed Liam cheerfully munching on an apple.
“Oh hey, you guys.” He said. Munch munch. “Oh – I just saw all of your guests in the hotel restaurant. They wanted to tell you that they haven’t been served yet.”
This pulled us up short.
We had called in everyone’s dinner orders at noon that day.
The guests had all showed up at the restaurant at seven thirty.
It was nine-thirty.
Crap.
We ran to the restaurant to find all of our guests looking…well, pissed. We asked the head waiter what the hell was going on. He told us that everyone else in the restaurant that were eating happily had called their orders in the day before, not just at noon, which is why they had all been served already. He left, and then a nearby Slovakian, who happened to speak English, turned around, mouth full of salmon.
“That’s not true,” he said. “I just ordered an hour ago.”
Kaityln went back into the kitchen and started ordering the kitchen staff around. I helped the waiters bring out plates, who realized the jig was up, and started working so frantically to get dishes out to our guests that nobody got what they had ordered.
So we sent out rounds of wine and after a while nobody seemed to mind that much.
The two of us ended up eating dinner at ten thirty.
To bed!
DAY SIX
Today we crossed the border into Poland. I got to ride my bike that day, and after giving the route rap in the echo-y lobby of Kolowrat, we rode into the morning mist across the border (I didn’t have any problems crossing this time) and up into the pine forests surrounding Zakopane. Today we rode past ski towns and tiny ski lifts and old people dressed the way you figure old Polish people dress and everything was green green green. A horse and buggy temporarily blocked our vans. I rode with two guests named Doug and Patty (my parents’ names).
Just after lunch, Kaitlyn picked up a full vanload of guests to drive into Zakopane. I dropped back on my bike to sweep the back of the group into town, when I ran into Liam, coming back from dropping the luggage off at the hotel in Zakopane.
He informed me that there was an eight-mile long car gridlock into Zakopane, that Kaityln was trapped in the middle of it probably for hours, and that all the guests still riding their bikes were about to ride right into it.
Sigh.
I went into a mad sprint on my bike, and managed to catch all the bikers and gather them around me before they hit the traffic, then carefully led them through the city to our hotel.
There I met a tired Kaitlyn (she had made three hours of small talk with the guests in the van) and we went out in Zakopane-it was sweet, blessed on your own night. We ate Polish pizzas and wandered the nighttime swirl of people meandering the main streets of Zakopane before heading back to our hotel – a restored 15th century manor house – and going to sleep for the night.
DAY SEVEN
Day seven was pretty mellow, too. The guests had a choice between hiking and biking that day. Sabrina went with the hikers, I drove the van supporting the bike riders, and Liam had the day off.
In the morning, before the riders left, Liam and I moved some of the bikes around. He finished working and went in to take a nap. I noticed that he had left his stepladder outside his van and taken off with the keys. Too lazy to go get his keys to put his stepladder back in his van, I just put it in my van.
A SPECIAL NOTE ON OUR STEP LADDERS:
When we transport our bikes, we put them on the roof of the vans on our special bike racking system.
A) Each van can hold twelve bikes on top, but as the vans are pretty tall, the only way that we can put bikes up there is by using stepladders.
B) Without the ladders, you can’t put any bikes on top of the van, IE nobody can shuttle.
More on this later.
The bike ride wound through more tiny little polish villages, in and out of green hills and ski lifts and cows and horses on freeways. I scooped up all the riders at the middle option (the afternoon was really tough) at a Pizza place. I hadn’t been expecting any shuttlers at that point, and had all sorts of gear covering all the seats in the van. After shuffling equipment around for a while (which involved pulling everything out of the van, then putting it all back in. This will be important later) the guests got in and we drove back to Zakopane.
That night we met back up with the hikers and went out to a wonderful restaurant with long wooden benches and berry desserts and waiters and waitresses in white costumes and then we were off to bed. One more day of biking.
DAY EIGHT
In the morning of our last day of biking (almost…there) Kaityln was giving a route rap to the guests when Liam came over, looking for something. I asked him what.
“Oh, I just can’t seem to find my step ladder, and I’ll need it to rack bikes later today.”
Oh yeah, I said, and went over to my van, where I had put both ladders…on the middle seat of my van…and had taken both ladders out the day before to make room for shuttlers…and had…ummmm….where were the ladders?
Holy crap.
I had left both ladders at the shuttle spot the day before.
We now couldn’t put a single bike on either van – and as this was the last day of biking, we were going to rack all 25 bikes at the end of the day.
Holy crap.
Liam gave me the look that he had been giving me all week (barely restrained laughter/I can’t believe you guys/ahahahahahahaha/Boy am I glad I’m not leading this trip) and wandered off, probably to burst out laughing behind a trailer.
Hmmmm…well, time to bite the bullet. I ran to my van and pulled out a map of the Zakopane area. Hmmm….the shuttle spot is here….but driving that way would take me two hours….but it looks like this road would….hmmm….
I looked at my watch. The guests would be leaving on their bikes in exactly 45 minutes.
I bet that I can make it to the shuttle spot, look for the ladders, and make it back in time; if I take this shortcut that I’ve never taken before.
Kaitlyn was free for a second. I walked over and told her what had happened. The look on her face was less like Liam’s (barely contained brevity) and more like sheer terror. I cut it off with an “I’m going to get them. I’ll be back in time. Don’t worry.”
And I left her, gaping in the middle of the Hotel Parking lot, jumped in the van, gunned the engine, and was off into the streets of Zakopane.
I drove really, really fast, holding the map against my steering wheel with one hand and glancing at the series of side streets as I maneuvered around cows and curious farmers. Finally I popped out at the shuttle spot – the pizza restaurant. I checked the clock. I had used twenty minutes to get there, meaning I could make it if I found the ladders right away and drove right back.
I ran to the tree where I thought I had left the ladders.
They were gone.
Holy crap.
I stood there in the middle of the parking lot and pondered. Who steals a ladder? Probably no one – I bet someone from the restaurant had found them. When would someone from the restaurant have found them? Probably on their way out to their car at the end of their shift – which means they would have already locked the pizza place for the night. Which means that they probably didn’t want to unlock it to put the ladders back in. Which means –
Do they have some sort of outside storage area? I looked – and saw a wooden gate at the side of the place. I ran over – reached over it, and opened the gate.
Both ladders were leaning against a wall back there.
Yes.
I threw them back in the van and drove back at much the same speed that I drove there.
And arrived exactly on time.
This time Liam did burst out laughing as I triumphantly handed him his ladder. He took off with the van and trailer to head to the end of the bike route to drop the trailer off. I put my ladder in my van and was getting ready to support the bike route when Kaityln ran up to me in her bike clothes.
“Where’s Liam?” She asked. Oh, he’s gone, I said. Shit, she said. He has my bike helmet. I can’t ride bike support without my helmet.
We looked at each other, and then started laughing again.
Oh shit.
We called Liam. He was a good deal ahead of us, and would need to drop the trailer off before he could bring a helmet back for Kaityln.
So we concocted a plan. She would get in the van with me and her bike, then I would drive her until we were right behind the last group of guests. I would then sneakily let her out, and she would walk her bike until Liam could catch her and give her a helmet, then she would ride super fast to catch the guests.
We drove along the route until we saw the guests. Kaitlyn squealed and ducked low so they couldn’t see her and I pulled over on to a side street and let her out.
I drove along the route for a while, giving out water and what not, and then heard the familiar sound of the speed barrier being broken. Liam blew by me, somewhat airborne, in the opposite direction, wearing a look of grim determination. He nodded at me and was gone.
Kaitlyn was going to get her helmet. Oh yes.
The riders rode up over hills and pastures and a spectacular view of a lake blue blue blue and then the ride ended at a restaurant overlooking the lake.
The three of us rapidly stripped the bikes of pedals and computers and racked them on the vans and trailers. A bus showed up just as the guests were finishing lunch and they got on with Kaityln as Liam and I finished strapping everything down and paying the restaurant and then we were all off. Liam was done for the week and started the 7-hour drive back to Budapest with a lot of the gear. I followed the bus in my van into the coolest city ever – Krakow.
Krakow explodes into the sky with gargoyles and old buildings and lights in shades of yellow and blue and green and a central square that is two football fields long and two football fields wide filled with street performers and oh yeah I talked about Krakow but geez it’s amazing. The Nazis liked Krakow and so spared it so they could use it for a headquarters during World War Two, as opposed to cities like Warsaw, which they completely razed to the ground. Every last building.
But Krakow was spared.
We were staying in the oldest hotel in Krakow and eating in the oldest restaurant (1254) in Krakow that night.
I spent the afternoon finishing a slideshow of our pictures of the week while Kaityln arranged to have a massive television with surround sound set up in our dinner hall so we could show the slide show in style after dinner.
We went to dinner and ate in a huge private hall covered with suits of armor and swords and faintly glimmering torches and then I went to set up the slideshow and realized that I had made a horrible mistake.
I had burned the DVD of the slideshow as a region one DVD.
This means it won’t play in European DVD players, like the one I had in front of me.
I turned to 25 expectant sets of eyes.
“What could be better,” I asked loudly, “Than watching a slideshow of our week on this massive TV?”
One of the guests squealed in excitement. They all started scooting closer.
“Why, watching it on my little computer!” I said, taking my computer out.
Their faces fell, and then a few of them burst out laughing. I played the slideshow, and everything was well. We wandered through the cold streets of Krakow back to out hotel, and that was that.
DAY NINE
The trip ended really, really well. We did a walking tour of Krakow, the guests had a great time, and everyone parted at lunch.
Kaityln had to grab a flight the next day (around noon) so we didn’t dally in Krakow – too much – well, ok, we dallied a lot, and left right as rush hour started, and didn’t actually leave Krakow for two more hours.
Just south of Krakow, it started pouring, and then right as we crossed the border into Slovakia and started climbing into the Grand Tatras, the rain intensified. And then the wind intensified.
And then we dropped into a stretch of 100 miles without a sign of civilization as the lightning storm started.
I had never really been in a lightning storm before. I mean, sure, I’ve been around thunder and lightning a bunch of times, but never striking so close and so frequently – I think there were blasts going off every twenty seconds.
We slowed to a crawl. Every now and then, the wind would intensify to the point that we had to stop the van and wait until we could see out the front window again. Explosions of thunder continued, and then we started crossing a valley where the road was lined with trees, many of which had crashed down onto the road.
We started having a series of morbid conversations. Should we turn back? No, because we would have to climb back through the top of the Tatras to get back to the nearest town, which would surely be more dangerous. We then talked about what would happen if the van were to be hit with a direct blast of lightning. Our roof bike rack was made out of steel, after all. We had to be a giant lightning conductor. But then again, weren’t we safe, ‘cause the tires of the van were rubber?
We pushed on and after an eternity reached Banska Bysterica, home of the Hotel Arcade, and buzzed up – would they give us a room for the night? The storm was too bad for us to continue. They would, and we wound our way up through the colossal and dark and empty hotel arcade to our room on the top floor.
We wrote some emails and wearily went to sleep as thunder continued to explode outside.
DAY TEN
I know that the Trip only has nine days, but it wasn’t quite over for us.
The morning dawned with some pretty great weather, and so we got up early so we could get Kaitlyn to her Budapest flight. The drive was uneventful, with the exception of the four hours of traffic that we got stuck in (two in and two out) on the way to the Budapest airport.
After Kaitlyn left, I had to head up to the Big Red Box at the Hotel Sylvanias and unload/rearrange/clean up the unit. The next team was coming in two days, and I had to figure out how to transfer all the stuff to them. I cleaned and organized until four in the morning, then drove the van down to a hotel in Szentendre and hid the keys for the next team to find, then emailed then with the hidden location and packed until six am, then jumped in a taxi for the Budapest Airport.
DAY ELEVEN
To say that I was really, really tired doesn’t even begin to come close to how I felt. Thrilling Adventures was flying me from Budapest to Milan, then Milan to Florence.
I would then have two days off until I kicked off an eight-day tour in Tuscany.
I blearily checked in for my flight and tried not to fall asleep waiting at the gate for my flight. I was a little nervous about sleeping because I had all my tip money in my man-purse, which was slung around my shoulders in an extremely manly fashion. I think by that point I had two thousand dollars in there.
I didn’t fall asleep, and made it to Milan in one piece. I had a few hours to wait in the Milan airport, so took out my laptop and started writing.
If you look at the start of this whole, many part Slovakia blog, I wrote those words at exactly this point – more than a year ago.
Right after I wrote:
“Right now I'm sitting in a corner of the perpetually busy and laughingly inefficient Milan Airport, having not slept in let's see the last time I woke up was 26 hours ago and my connection to Florence is seeming not to happen due to a cluster of men in green Air Italia jackets viciously gesturing at each other behind the counter, most of them on cell phones. I don't mind though, I missed this place a bit.”
…I had to go to the bathroom. I got up and went to the bathroom and went into a stall. I took a while hanging my various jackets and bags around the inside of the stall and then did my business, then gathered everything up and went back out to wait for my flight. I was writing the next part of this blog when an announcement came on the intercom in Italian.
Yes, I’m pretty good with Italian – but I have to be listening pretty attentively to understand it. So all I caught out of the message was my name, Robert Johnston.
Huh. I guess they were calling me at the gate – I must be late for my flight! I grabbed all my stuff and headed to the gate. I came up to the lady, reaching for my passport as I got to the gate.
She gave me a confused look. She told me that they weren’t ready for boarding just yet. Huh. So what were they paging me for? She didn’t know – it wasn’t them.
It was at this moment that I realized that my passport wasn’t in my pockets. Well, sometimes I put it in my murse…which also had my tip money…which was no longer around my chest.
It was gone.
I had left it in the bathroom.
Holy shit.
I ran to the bathroom. No murse.
That’s what they must have been paging me for! Someone found my murse! I ran out of the bathroom and looked around at the colossal terminal.
Another page came on the air. They were now boarding my flight for Florence.
Holy shit.
I just started running from gate to gate – had they found my bag? No, No, No signore, non l’abbiamo trovato. They kept suggesting a different set of bored looking airport employees at different desks who all didn’t know a thing about paging a Robert Johnston.
Another page came over the loudspeaker. They were making the final boarding call for my flight to Florence.
I started running back to my gate – what was I going to do?
I then noticed a sort of office called “Family assistance” that had a question mark on it.
Maybe….
I ran into that office and was greeted with a cheer from the three office ladies.
One of them had my murse. Someone had turned it in. “Sei fortunato,” she told me, and handed me the murse.
My fingers trembled as I unzipped it and flipped it open – and was looking straight at two thousand dollars, cash.
She looked at it, and shook her head. “Sei molto fortunato,” she said.
Someone had found it in the bathroom and turned it in without touching a single dollar.
And my passport was still there.
Fuck yeah.
I ran to my flight and was the last one on. They closed the gate behind me.
Fuck yeah.
Off to Italy.
When I arrived in Florence, I waited tiredly at the baggage claim as everybody got his or her bags and left. No sign of my bags.
I went to the baggage assistance window. She shrugged, and had me fill out a form.
I went back to the Tuscany Leader House with just my carry-on bag.
They found my bags four months later.
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