Update:Mon 09:20

Sunday, 09 October

Having pumped the rear tyre up I checked the bolts to find that one of the small ones holding the rear pannier frame on (which have never even loosened before) was missing. After rummaging about to find a spare I then discovered that the original had sheared off. Well, I'll have to remain a bolt down for the rest of the trip. It shouldn't be too bumpy.

The GPS was still knackered -- hence no location update for yesterday -- despite being sat on a warm set top box all night. It goes through funny moods when it's unwell often, when you turn it on, it flashes the screen on and off as it immediately dies. Other times the screen will go white and remain white for a long time but it you leave it long enough it'll eventually start. Noting that by starting you are given the initial "satellite" page but be able to do nothing else.

The weather was cold (8C) overcast but not threatening rain so I put the GPS on the bike in speculative hope that 90kph winds might blow it dry. It's worked before and began to work here. It was able to tell me that at 20 degrees east is a set of traffic lights by a big Tescos in Kracow. 50 degrees north was only a minute of arc further south. I note these salient points as there is a web project (which I can't readily find) where people try to go to the ordinal intersections (eg. where 50 degrees North intersects with all 360 lines of longitude) and take a picture. On of them is in the suburbs of Kracow.

Up until then the E40 had not been a disappointing dual carriageway carving a dull path through the countryside. Instead it had started as a rather bumpy country road before becoming slightly better and slogging through town after town generating a huge tailback as the number of passing places was very small. But at least you can see something and most towns seem to retain some sort of Gothic building in the centre. There's also plenty of hotels -- not so many cafes, mind, but I guess you can eat at the hotels. It looks like an easy place to explore.

After Kracow, the E40 did become a dull and despairing dual carriageway (motorway) with the added benefit of being a toll road so you can pay for the privilege of fewer, more expensive and with less variety of resources. I stopped in one for a cup of coffee to see a large wall map of Poland from which I noted that the was a road (roads) running parallel to the E40, the 78 and the 94. Aha! Time for something a bit more interesting.

Unfortunately, I didn't know where I was (other than beyond Kracow) so I took a punt that if I left the E40 and went north I'd hit the 78 and could follow it. I had to to this in the pouring rain as the weather had turned killing the limited functionality of the GPS, of course. The satellite page had included a heading feature so at least I knew if I was heading W, say. With this gone I could only follow road signs to towns not on my Michelin paper map of Europe underneath a semi-opaque tank bag cover. I have a detailed atlas of Eastern Europe. But it's an atlas and requires extracting from a pannier and reading in the rain and/or with wet hands and clothing. It stayed in the pannier.

I followed signs for a town that was on my map but no sign of the 78. I then rolled around through another town before finding a sign for Wroclaw (good!) on the 88. Well, it must run parallel too! It doesn't. In fact it intersects with the E40 where you transfer to continue your trip to Wroclaw. Bugger. I filled up with fuel on the way, off the E40, before discovering that I paid more than they were charging on the E40. Damn!

I tried again at another town on my map and this time I managed (by accident rather than design) to stumble on the 94 to Wroclaw. Hurray! Or maybe not so hurray as the number of facilities was much reduced -- this being a much smaller road than the E40. That's not to say there weren't any but every 30km rather than every 5km. Not a big thing unless you're in a strange country, don't know how often these things do appear and the sun is going down.

So I pitched up here at sunset which has been fine. They are charging me more than the 3* hotel was last night but at 140Z it's still not a huge amount.

This location was generated by my backup GPS. Backup GPS? Of course! We all carry two, don't we? Actually this one is the ancient(?) one I used when going round the world, the accuracy, I note is +/- 6m at best compared to the WAAS-aware (waterlogged) one which can be +/- 2m. It also can hold up to 24kB of maps. The EU mapping data for the 60Cx is 1.6GB. I don't think it'll fit.

Currently at lat/long: n50 59.743 e17 12.099

Motel Karczma, somewhere on the #94!