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Miscellaneous photos of the last few days

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Beautiful Krakow.  We have had a wonderful time here.  There are still two days to enjoy.  We don’t have much planned for the next two days.  We will go to church tomorrow at a place that does English translation for guests and we’ll probably do a picnic Monday down by the river and maybe visit the Jewish part of town and also see Schindler’s factory.

The salt mines were fascinating.  We walked down over 130 meters worth of steps, walked through a fraction of the 300km’s of mining tunnels, were wowed by the cathedral carved out of the salt mine and the sheer attention to detail that the artisans gave to their work and amazed at the miner’s success.  The mine is over 400 years old and was only shut down in the 1990’s due to unprofitability. 

We have visited the center of town several times and listened to the guides amuse their listeners as they opened up the weird and amusing parts of the town’s history.

We visited the castle in Krakow and… to tell the truth, weren’t real impressed.  The natural caves underneath (dragon cave) were probably the most interesting thing for the kids.  The legend states that the dragon was killed by an ordinary young man who became King Krak because of his deed and the former king’s promise. 

We rented bikes today and avoided all but one accident – remarkable!  (Angie was testing her abilities by riding down a very steep hill.  She came out of it pretty well.)  The three hours of biking wasn’t a blast, but it was a pleasurable and leisurely few hours of enjoying wind in the hair, views of the river we hadn’t seen, and covering ground at 5 times the speed we had been covering ground while walking!  We’d do it again.

After more than a little time-wasting trying to find the train station ticket booths, I found out that a train leaves here a couple of hours after we are due to pick up our passports Tuesday morning.  We’ll take the train back to Lvov and then drive back to Rovno before sacking out.  I guess we’ll arrive back at about 4:00am in Rovno and then next day drive on to Rzhyshchiv.