Our trip from Prague to Krakow was pretty cheap.  Ryanair services Krakow with multiple daily direct flights and one-way tickets were only $30, bags were an additional $30 and the flight is less than one-hour.  Ryanair is possibly the crappiest airline in the world and they charge you for everything.  But if you follow the rules, and you can put up with hard seats and no legroom, you can get great deals.  On-board they sell everything, food, drinks, perfume and even scratch-off lottery tickets.

Anyway, our flight was uneventful and we got into Krakow and grabbed an Uber from the airport to our hotel for about $25.  We opted for another Wyndham hotel that I could get cheaply with points.  It was the Wyndham Vienna House Easy.  Three nights were only 20,000 points or about $120 if you buy the points.  Optionally, you could pay $500 for the room.

In this case the hotel was two tram stops from the old town or a $5 Uber ride.  The Ubers are actually taxi’s, but by using the Uber or Bolt apps your price is locked in and payment was electronic.

When we arrived at the hotel, our room wasn’t ready so we jumped on the tram and headed for the old-town.  In Krakow, they took down the old-city walls and converted the area where they stood into a park that circled the old-town.

The old-town extended down a main street call the Royal Way and lead from the old city gate to an old castle which sat on the banks of the Vistula River.  Again, the city was very clean and safe.  We wondered the old-town and climbed several towers…always a favorite of ours. 

At the St Mary Basilica Tower, on the top of every hour, a bugler opens a window and plays a short song.  Very unique and kind of fun.

Like Prague, the city has a medieval (Wawel) castle that is a major tourist destination.  Here the grounds are free and you only pay to get into the buildings.  After a few hours of exploring we took the trolley back to the hotel to check in.  There really wasn’t much near the hotel so we grabbed an Uber and went to a Carrefour grocery store to buy some wine and snacks.  For dinner here we opted to use Uber Eats and have food…mostly pizza, delivered to the hotel.  The pizza in Krakow was exceptionally good….or we were exceptionally hungry.

The next day, we were picked up at 5:30 AM for our tour of Auschwitz, the main German Concentration camp used to exterminate Jews and other people determined to be expendable or unwanted.  Auschwitz, actually consists of multiple locations and the tours are strictly controlled.  Our tickets were for 7:30 and the site was about an hour outside of Krakow.

The first half of the tour was of Auschwitz 1, concentration camp.  This was the original camp and opened in 1938.  Here we went through barracks and saw where prisoners were housed and how they were treated.  We did go through the remaining gas chamber and saw how the Nazis exterminated their victims.  It was very sad and moving but, maybe because it was so long ago, it was not as emotionally difficult to tour as I had expected.

We did see pictures of Anne Frank and quotes from Victor Frankel, whose book “Man’s Search for Meaning” is one of my favorite books.

There were many stories, but the that stuck with me was about Father Maximillian Kolbe.  He offered to trade his life for a young father in the camp.  The Nazi’s obliged and placed him into a hunger cell, where he lived for 16 days with no food or water.  After 16 days, he was still alive so they gave him a lethal injection.  Pope John Paul toured the cell where he was held and canonized him in 1982.

We walked by cases with 10,000 or more shoes including children’s shoes and cases filled with hair shaved for the dead to be used for blankets of other linin.  It is unimaginable that people could be that cruel and filled with so much hate,  This was really a sad moment in our history.

We spent about 1.5 hours at this site, before we drove over to the second site Auschwitz Birkenau, This site was equipped and designed to exterminate people by the thousands.  This is where the large train tracks came in and people, often women and children, were marched to one of four gas chamber/crematorium facilities for their execution.  As they went to their death, music played and they went willingly to the showers and their promised new life.  Of course, we know the result, over 1 million Jews are others were slaughtered here. Near the end of the war, the Nazi’s blew up the gas chambers and tried to destroy as much evidence of their crimes as best as possible. 

After we finished the tour, we headed off to Schindler’s factory.  This is where he tried to save as many Jewish people as possible by employing them in his ceramics factory.  Unfortunately, were unable to get a ticket and headed back to the hotel and some more wine and good pizza.

The next day were spent eating pierogies, exploring the old town and even took a ride on the Krakow Eye, Ferris Wheel.  The city is known as the “Dragon” City and they have created a Dragon Trail around the city with small metal sculptures which were fun to find.   The most impressive, fire breathing sculpture is outside the Dragon’s Den at the castle.  This small cave is well worth the admission fee and you may even see a dragon inside.

The next day, we grabbed and Uber and headed to the airport for the next stop on this year’s European adventure.

Krakow is an easy, safe and clean city.  It is well worth a visit!  Even though the pierogies were not as good as expected, however the pizza made up for it