Hello Crocodile (Krakow)

June 21st--Today was a travel day for us to Krakow, Poland (or crocodile as Austin calls it). We were sad to say goodbye to the beautiful city of Prague, but not to the apartment we stayed in. If I had to take another "spit" shower, it wasn't going to be pleasant. The bathroom in this apartment was so dirty especially the shower. Luckily, there was a garden bath tub that looked like it was fairly new. It had a shower head nozzle on it so without too many details and definitely no pictures, I chose to stand in the bathtub and "take a shower". Now, mind you the ceiling was sloped right there too so I had to really hunker off to make this happen. Use your imagination if you want, but it was a pain to do and especially while trying to touch as little as possible. Yuk! Anyway, so we left this apartment at 7:00 a.m. to catch our 8:00 a.m. train. We were lucky enough to get on a fairly empty train and got a compartment all to ourselves. The 4 hours to Bohumin went by really quick. When we arrived in Bohumin, we had to switch trains. We got on the 2nd train for the day and it was a really nice train. We again got our own compartment and this time had electrical outlets so the kids watched a movie all the way to Katowice. We arrived late into Katowice so we only had about 15 minutes to get to our next train. While we were on the 2nd train, the ticket guy informed us that we would have to purchase tickets for the children for the train into Krakow. So, Mike left me and the kids standing on the platform with the luggage while he ran downstairs to buy the tickets. I looked around trying to see if I could locate where our train was, but had no luck. Mike came back up the stairs with no tickets in hand. He said the ticket lady couldn't understand English so he just said "forget it, we'll just pay a fine if we have to". We took off down the stairs pulling our suitcases to change platforms and then up a different flight of stairs pulling, carrying, lugging all 4 suitcases. We thought our train left from this platform, but some nice workers informed us that that wasn't our train and we needed to go back to the platform we had just come from. So, again down and up the stairs. Once we arrived up to that platform, our train was posted on the board and said postponed on it. Luckily it was late or we would have missed it. It was a mad dash to get on this train. It was totally full and we found a compartment with a lady, her 2 1/2 year old son and her father. It turned out great because Abby and Austin played with this little boy, David, all the way to Krakow. Oh, and we didn't have to pay a fine when the ticket guy came around. He looked at the tickets we had and didn't say anything about not having tickets for the kids. We arrived in Krakow about 4:30. Our only problem at this point was we didn't have the address of our apartment. The reason for this was that our internet in Prague didn't work last night nor was it working this morning. We found a tourist information in the Krakow train station that offered internet. Mike had to go to the ATM first to get money before he could get on his e-mails. He quickly got on and got the information we needed. We got in a taxi and were on our way arriving at the apartment about 10 minutes later. We were greeted by Jacek and taken up 4 1/2 flights of stairs (no elevator). The apartment though is wonderful. It has been remodeled with a contemporary look and has a clean bathroom. Hallelujah! We made our usual trip to the local grocery store to pick up a few things and then off to dinner we went. There is a local pizzeria right by the apartment so pizza it was for dinner. Today was probably not the exact way Mike would have liked to spend his Father's Day, but at least he could say he got some quality time with his kids.