Trip to Germany and Poland

Mike and Judy Henderson
May 9 - 30, 2015

5/28/2015 [Warsaw, Poland] Seville (Spain) won the soccer game, defeating Ukraine 3-2.

After our futile search yesterday for a restaurant that served breakfast, we decided to have breakfast in the hotel, even though it was expensive.  The hotel restaurant is actually quite good, although it's small.  This view of the restaurant shows that there are not many tables.  Judy is sitting at the table on the right.

Breakfast was served buffet style, as in all the other hotels we've stayed in.

Here's Judy, beautiful at breakfast.

After breakfast we walked to Saint Anne's church for an organ concert at noon.

The organist, Przemyslaw Kapitula, dressed in period clothes for the concert.  The program consisted of a concerto by Johann Ernst, Improvisations by Mieczyslaw Surynski, and two pieces by Bach, the last being the famous Toccata and Fugue in D minor.  It was a good performance.

After the concert we walked to the Warsaw Rising Museum (that's what it's called).  It's a museum dedicated to the uprising that occurred in 1944 as the Russians were approaching Warsaw (see my short history comments earlier).  However, the museum was very crowded with kids - it must have been school field trip day - so we left fairly quickly.  The picture only shows a small part of the museum - it's quite large.

The walk over had been fairly long so we took a taxi back to the main part of town - to the Chopin Museum.

It has an interesting collection of Chopin artifacts. There were few originals, though, because many were either destroyed by angry former lovers, sold at auction, or lost in war-time destruction. After spending some time at the museum, we took a slow walk back to the hotel.

Having learned that our hotel restaurant had a noted chef, we decided to have our farewell dinner there.  Judy in the restaurant.

We both chose the same dish, monkfish with pulled pork on a bed of potatoes - an unusual combination, but very good.

Then it was off to bed for an early rising to make our plane.

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5/29/2015 Our last day in Warsaw.  We woke early - our car was coming at 7am for us to make a 9am flight.  Fortunately that gave us enough time to find the Germanwings counter, which was somewhat challenging, and by the time we cleared the security check it was almost time for boarding. 

Soon we were airborne.

Germanwings uses smaller planes for flights in Europe.  I grabbed this shot after we had arrived in Dusseldorf.

We returned to the hotel we stayed in when we first arrived in Germany, the Villa Achenbach, and then went for lunch (we hadn't had breakfast) to a German restaurant.

After an afternoon nap we completed the circle and had dinner at the Italian restaurant we had found on our first night of the trip.  This time we shared a pizza. 

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 5/30/2015 Our last day in Europe - we fly back to LAX today, leaving about 1:30 pm.  There was no rush so we had time for a leisurely breakfast at the hotel.  The dining room is small so we were joined by another guest who was a German tax attorney from the Black Forest region.  We had a nice chat at breakfast.

When we asked him where he was from, he said, "I live in Paradise" then explained it was the Black Forest. 

After breakfast we took a cab to the airport, arriving early enough to spend some time in the Air Berlin lounge until our flight was called.  The plane seating was exactly the same as on our outbound flight so I won't include any pictures. Flying west takes longer because of the prevailing winds so the flight was a bit over 11 hours.  Air Berlin did a good job of feeding us.  Here's a picture of the appetizer dish - I forgot to take a picture of the main course.

Eventually we reached LAX, about 4 pm local but midnight body time, and were able to breeze through customs because we have Global Entry. [Side note: Global Entry really makes a difference. If you plan to do any international travel, look into it.]

The driver was waiting for us at the exit and took his two exhausted passengers home.  Everything was fine at home.  We'll pick up Bernie (my cat) tomorrow, and Skipper (our dog) on Monday.  Gradually, things will get back to normal.

And so ends another travel adventure.

You can see our other trips here