Instead of Christmas Markets, today was a day of castles. To start off the day we headed a short ways southwest to Castle Lichtenstein. Perched on a cliff over looking a long valley Lichtenstein Castle was built on the remains of an older medieval castle and was built after the owner read a book about…

Christmas Market! Today was the first Christmas Market of the trip in the town of Esslingen. However; it was not just a Christmas Market but also a Medieval Market. This meant that, while it may be smaller than some of the other markets, it offered a wider diversity of items. Most importantly it offered some…

After the success of last year’s trip to France’s eastern Christmas Markets, we have come back to Europe to try more of Germany’s Christmas Markets. The big markets we are hitting this year are Stuttgart, Esslingen, Rothenburg, Nurnberg and Munich. But before that, our first day will be spent visiting the fairy tale castle of…

Turned out to be a lucky day today. It was originally supposed to rain all day and ended up with only an extremely light sprinkle first thing and then settled into a grey day. After grabbing a quick breakfast, I headed over to the Krakow Underground museum. Similar to the Archaeological Museum in Montreal, this…

I received a pleasant surprise today and ended up with a sunny day! I had planned for two rainy days in Krakow so to get even one sunny day was fantastic. I spent the first part of today at the Wawel Castle, one of the must sees of Krakow. There are several different tickets you…

Really interesting site today, I headed to the Wieliczka Salt Mine. The mine was in operation for over 700 years. All of the salt was dug out by hand and helped fund the kingdom of Poland. The mine is no longer in operation and has been declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Currently, visitors can…

Sadly, today I left Zakopane to begin making my way to Krakow. I had one stop over before I get there and that was to the city of Gorlice. Don’t bother looking it up in tour books, it’s not going to be in any of them. The whole reason I went is because we believe…

As you may have noticed, I have skipped day 8. This is because day 8 was a dud. I was supposed to take a gondola ride up the mountain south of Zakopane but got to wait for over 3 hours in line instead. The gondola broke down when I was ten feet from the ticket…

Hopefully, this will have been the most driving I’ll have to do in one day. Leaving Toruń at 06:30 I arrived at my first destination of Castle Ogrodzieniec around 11:00. I went to this castle for two reasons. One was to try and break up the drive, it ended up making it longer. Two was…

A bit shorter of a a write up today as I only went one place, the Archaeological Museum of Biskupin. This was one of the first and largest archaeological reserves in Europe and the only one in Poland, when created. The site was found by accident when a local school teacher was walking around the…