We woke up yesterday to a damp morning, but the weather forecast predicted no rain so we decided to head for the hills and do some hiking in Tatra National Park.

We started off hiking through the forest and met Princess Toadstool along the way.

After about an hour of walking, we broke through into a meadow with views of the peaks we were heading for.

After that it was a steep uphill climb to the ridge at 1900 meters.

Sarah got mad at me because we were passing too many people. What can I say, I was born to crush souls. Especially when nasty switchbacks are involved. I shouldn’t feel too proud though, half the people we passed were drinking beer and smoking cigarettes at the top.

We dined on some of our mountain cheese at the top and enjoyed the spectacular views.

And then bounded off along the ridge, pretending we were a couple of Chamois. Sarah was disappointed that we didn’t spot any real ones.

It was chilly and wet at the top. Sarah almost succumbed to hypothermia when we were posing for this shot.

Normally, there is a gondola that runs up and down the mountain, but it is currently under renovation. That was bad news for us, because we both hate hiking downhill. It would have been great to hike around on the ridge some more and then take a 20 minute ride down on the gondola, but instead we had a three hour descent to look forward too. At least we got to descend through a gorgeous valley.

Towards the end, the trail deteriorated into some sort of torture device for a tired hiker’s feet. Sarah was dying to meet the person who thought that jagged rocks were a good hiking surface!

Today we are relaxing and tomorrow we head for Slovakia and then Croatia where we will travel for two weeks with our friend Sean.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 3rd, 2007 at 12:00 pm and is filed under Europe, Poland. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.