Lublin; Wednesday, 25 July, 2018

I’d stayed overnight at the airport to avoid having to get up too early, though with the beautiful air conditioning of the hotel making decent sleep likely for the first time in over a month I was in danger of oversleeping so I set lots of alarms, and in the end got woken by the first one at 04:30

Bleary eyed I headed over to the airport, checked in and then after a quick breakfast headed over to the gate for boarding. The flight was booked to leave from a bus gate so it was pretty obvious that we would get an early boarding call, and that we did – with the first bus leaving nearly 50 minutes before the scheduled departure time of the flight.

Clearly they had been hurrying people through the airport as the last bus pulled up about 20 minutes before departure and we were all closed up and ready to go a good 10 minutes early, though air traffic control insisted we waited for our assigned slot so, in the end, we didn’t leave until we were supposed to.

A smooth flight and an even smoother journey through the airport meant that less then 40 minutes after the plane had hit the tarmac I was already on a train into the city centre. From the main station I walked down to my hotel for the night to see if my room was ready to check in to.

The receptionist made a couple of phonecalls to see if my room was ready and then confidently stated that it was and issued me with a key – having changed the room number on it before handing it over. I headed up to the floor, opened the door and it was obvious straight away that this was a much smaller room than I’d had the last time, and as I’d booked the same room it was obvious there had been an error.

I headed back down to reception where they tried to persuade me that the room type I had booked wouldn’t be available for a long time so I’d probably be best of just taking that room – with no offer of a refund of the difference, so I declined their offer and said I’d be back just before 3 to checkin, leaving my bags with reception.

I headed out into town and over to the Old Town of Warsaw to find somewhere to have lunch. After lunch I picked up the land train to do a short tour round the edge of the old and new towns and by then it was time to head back to the hotel to try checking in again.

This time there was no messing around and I got the right room. I collected my luggage and freshened up before heading back out into town to do a bit more exploring, eventually ending up back in the Old Town square just after 7pm, so it felt like a good time to stop for some dinner.

I had a very nice dinner of Polish dumplings in a restaurant on the square before finishing off my walk through the old town back at the castle square. As it was starting to get dark, and I was starting to feel the effects of a 04:30 start, I headed back to the hotel to turn in for the night.