115 km cycle, a ferry, a train and an awful bus journey
When I last wrote, Hannah and I were still on the farm, getting rashes from the cucumbers. We were both a little sad to go, despite the heat and the 5:15am alarms, it had been a genuinely wonderful couple of weeks. Especially spending time with Hannah.
But leave we did. Hannah took the sensible option and got a series of buses and trains back to my sister's house in Überlingen. I had my bike. I decided to cycle the 115 kilometres in a single day.
It started well. Plenty of energy, wind behind me, quietly confident I'd make the last ferry across the lake with time to spare. By the halfway point I was feeling fit and still pretty confident I could do it.
Then the hills started. Proper hills. In several cases I had to get off the bike and walk. Then the route left the lakeside entirely and went cross-country, which was lovely but the navigation was harder and slowed me down. Google Maps informed me I wasn't going to make the ferry in time. Plus a storm was building on the horizon.
I nearly gave up.
But I kept going. Uphill, into increasingly strong winds, telling myself that at some point it would have to go downhill again. And eventually, it did. A long, glorious descent towards the ferry port at Wallhausen, which I took at a speed that was definitely not sensible.
I made the ferry with two minutes to spare.
I arrived in Überlingen exhausted and elated, the heavens opened immediately, and I genuinely didn't care. It’s the furthest I've ever cycled in a single day (75 miles on a fully loaded mountain bike), I'd made it, and there was a beer, great food and an extra night with Hannah waiting at my sister's house.
Worth every hill.
A couple of days later, Hannah continued her journey to Paris and I said goodbye to my sister for the second time on this trip. I travelled to Frankfurt to meet my eldest child, Raven in Frankfurt. We hadn’t seen each other for eighteen months. Raven is visually impaired, which is why I'd arranged to meet them there - easier to travel together from a familiar city than navigate arrivals alone. We had lunch, then boarded an overnight FlixBus to Kraków.
Overnight FlixBus is, I can confirm, bloody awful. The buses in South America were considerably better for long journeys. We arrived intact but not particularly rested.
I hadn't known what to expect of Kraków as my only reference point for Poland was Warsaw in the 1990s, which was fairly grim concrete-jungle territory at the time. But Kraków was nothing like that. It's a beautiful, walkable, surprisingly large city and I'd happily go back and see more of it. We stayed in a great hostel just outside the old town, and met the other volunteers from our Angloville programme on a guided tour of the old town and Jewish quarter.
The Angloville volunteering programme has been genuinely lovely. The format is straightforward: Polish professionals who want to improve their English are paired with native speakers for conversation sessions throughout the day. There are structured sheets to guide discussions and the topics are interesting.
We're based in a hotel near the Slovakian border, with a swimming pool, sauna, jacuzzi. It’s a very different volunteering experience to that of the farm!
Unfortunately, I've not managed to write anything new these past couple of weeks and I'm unlikely to manage anything next week either, as we're doing the same programme again at a hotel further north in Poland.
But what I do have, is feedback on the workbook - Solo In Six. A couple of lovely ladies have read it and come back with thoughts. Mostly positive, which was a relief. But there are also some clear improvements — the formatting, the artwork, some content additions, a few website changes too.
I'm not going to be able to action any of it right now. But I'm genuinely looking forward to sitting down with all of it in a few weeks, when I'll be house sitting near Lake Constance with proper quiet and fresh eyes so I’ll see it clearly again.
At least, that's what I'm telling myself.
