St Weronika, Patron of Hapless Travellers

Leaving Poland proved to be a more difficult task than we had thought. After saying goodbye to Helena on Thursday morning, we were next due to meet Rob in Vilnius on Friday afternoon, so had over 24 hours to get from Poland to Lithuania. An easy task, you might think. Our initial plan was to take the overnight bus from Gdansk to Vilnius - a ten hour stint, but attractively cheap and with no changes - but we found out that this only ran alternate nights, and of course, not the night that we needed to travel. So we decided to travel 5 hours back to Warsaw and take the overnight bus from Warsaw to Vilnius. Here too we were thwarted. That bus also only runs alternate nights - and not the night we needed. You would think that it would be organised so that there was always a bus running overnight from Poland, either from Warsaw or Gdansk....but that would just make too much sense. With the aid of the Thomas Cook railway book (the Bible of the road), we worked out that we could get to Vilnius by Friday evening if we caught the 7.25 from Warsaw and changed at Sestokai, just over the Lithuanian border. However, this left us stranded in Warsaw for the night.

And so it was that Weronika received yet another phone call from Damsels in Distress and came one step nearer to canonization by having soup and pasta waiting for us when we arrived at 10pm. It was a short but, we hope, sweet visit, as we were off again at 6.30 the next morning to get to Warsaw Centralna. We were a little early (alright, half an hour) but we were absolutely determined not to miss that train, as there probably wouldn't have been another one for several months. Once we were on the train, we thought that the drama had ended. No such luck. We then had to decipher Polish announcements about which part of the train to sit on depending on where you wanted to go. Cue much heaving of bags up and down the train and general confusion. The train then proceeded to run half an hour late, meaning that we would miss the one connection that day from Sestokai to Vilnius. Stress levels had reached fever pitch when we arrived at Sestokai and raced over to the other platform where the train was about to leave.

I have never been so relieved to arrive at a place in my life. Vilnius certainly likes to be elusive. Odd for the biggest capital of the Baltics but I suppose it keeps out all but the most determined travellers. Here endeth the Saga of the Two Maidens and the Polish Public Transport System.