Lublin; Sunday, 29 July, 2018

Today was just going to be about travelling.

After breakfast I finished off my packing, checked out of the hotel and caught the bus back out to the railway station on the edge of town.

I’d checked online and the train I was catching came in as a local service from nearby and then had additional carriages added to turn it into the Inter City service back to Warsaw. I’d though that it might be possible the additional carriages would already be at the station so I could get on them early, but it turned out they were instead parked, in the baking sun, in a siding.

The local train came in almost on time and over the next 10 minutes there was lots of shouting and moving of engines, but it wasn’t until about 5 minutes before we were due to depart that the additional carriages turned up and were connected onto the train.

All the time they had been sitting in the sidings the windows had been fully closed, and with no air conditioning, it meant that the individual compartments were boiling when we got on board, even after opening the windows and when the train finally started moving, more than five minutes late, getting some air moving it was still baking on board.

It was another long, slow, and very hot journey back across Poland to Warsaw, and along the way the train continued to get a bit later, so that by the time we reached the edge of Warsaw we were over 10 minutes late.

I hopped off the train at Warsaw Wschodnia station to the east of the centre where I was able to quickly change onto the beautifully air-conditioned train out to the airport. It would have been quicker to have stayed on the intercity train and changed at the Central station as the airport train sat at Wschodnia for a number of minutes, and another 10 minutes at the Central station, but I didn’t care – the longer I could sit in the cold air of the train the better.

The train arrived at the airport about 20 minutes before checkin was due to open so I was able to wander slowly up to the checkin area, and rearrange my bag, before checking in and then heading on through to departures and my flight home.