If you ever go to Sanok, do stay at Hotel Jagiellonski. Natalia and I shared a beautiful room with hardwood floors and comfortable double beds, a huge airy window, a sofa and two ottoman chairs. The room was 160 zlotys a night, which worked out to $73, or less than $40 for each of us. Eugene’s room was 130 zlotys and it looked very nice too, although of course smaller. Breakfast was included, and it was huge and yummy. And they have free wireless internet.
After breakfast, we walked up the hill to the main part of town to get some maps from the tourist bureau and also to get more money from the bank machine that worked for our cards.
Our first stop was an outdoor folk museum. This part of Poland was Ukrainian until Operation Wisla after WWII, when all of the Ukrainians in the area were deported to the Soviet Union. The folk museum displayed traditional houses and churches from that earlier era. It was interesting to see and touch artifacts that we had just read about. For example, Natalia had heard about wooden cemetery markers. They had some here:
We were both struck by the beauty and elegance of the cemetery marker. Later, when we were in the museum gift shop, we noted several carved figures similar to the ones used in the markers.
Our next stop was a small village close to the Ukrainian-Polish border. We saw more of these carvings:
Something else that we noticed as we were driving through this rural area was ornate road markers every half kilometer or so. Natalia speculates that these are markers commemorating the end of serfdom from Austro-Hungarian times. I would be curious to find out more information about them. They’re beautiful:
We found it easy to navigate in rural Poland. Everything is well marked and many people speak English. Our next stop was Krakow, so we backtracked and drove through Sanok again and had an early supper at Hotel Jagiellowska and then continued on to Krakow.
We got into town quite late at night and the street we needed to take to get to our hotel was under construction. Hotel Wielopole is just a few steps away from the city centre of Krakow and so very convenient. It was the most expensive place on our entire trip, so Eugene had booked himself into a hostel to save us money. Our room was clean and comfortable, but tiny. We met Eugene the next day at the hotel for breakfast.
