August 1st Its Monday so it must be Poland

Up at 8am suitably refreshed and after a shower we are on the road for 9.15. Jan takes first shift as I update the diary. With the job done I decide on another snooze and wake up to Jan saying ‘what do I do now?’ As my eyes focus I see we are at the Polish border. We pull over and get our passports checked and then we are through. We come across lines of little huts doing exchange but can’t be bothered haggling about it so grab some zloty (5.5 to £) and go. Jan’s drawn the short straw (again) as its all built up areas, no chance to give Marvin his head. First city is Wroclaw and so having ensured we are on the right road I inspect the inside of my eyelids (again) When I wake we are parked somewhere with a man waving a ticket machine at us. We are in the middle of the city and with some quick map work we plan a route out to Warsaw and after a scenic tour we say goodbye to Wroclaw.

More and more miles of slow roads and we discover that although the Polish petrol stations are full of beer, wine and a wonderful array of car parts they don’t do sandwiches which up until now have been our staple diet! We try every petrol station we pass but apart from some unidentifiable lumps there is nothing and we get hungrier, we search for food but if we see a shop there’s no way to park and the signs for Tescos seem to be just that – signs! There are loads of Ikeas stores though so if we needed a futon called Sven we would have been ok. Now we are so hungry even the ranks of McDonalds start to seem attractive (well ok maybe not). Warsaw arrived and still no food!!! Just as we start to drive through we get a text from Andy and Mark telling us that the road to Lonza is closed so go via Bialystok and as if by magic we see a sign for it!. We head off but food becomes our main purpose and eventually we see a little deli, bread cheese ham and mayo and a big bag of crisps make a great meal when your ravenous.

The weather was getting hotter – the sun was beating down but without hats we didn’t think having the roof back wasa good idea.

Our Archos MP3 player plays one album then locks and no amount of button pressing will get it to work so we let the battery run down and on restarting it seems to be ok, so we play another album, then the transmitter goes on the blink so we decide to leave it till another day and listen to the local radio... pop rock and the odd bit of classical!

Our first fuel stop is at about 4pm ,we are making really slow progress. Neil takes over the driving and we finally hit the clear roads, mile after mile of tree lined roads roll past and by 8.30 it’s time for yet another fuel stop. We get straight back into it and we set Bialystock as our target but Neil was still feeling ok so when we got there we decided to push on to Augustow. It’s still a lovely warm night, we drive with the windows open and the radio wound up high as Jan tries to get some sleep.
Next town Augustow comes and goes and Neil start to feel drowsy so we pull over and have a snack and then drive on through very twisty roads ... it’s real fun! We then head for Suwalki and decide it time to stop for the night but can we find anywhere to park up? No way! So another town passed and we see a petrol station with parking. We fill up and grab a beer, but the parking is too open being in the town centre, so we head on towards Latvia looking for a place to sleep. To find that the road is all dug up, with contraflows and a concrete slab infill and we are down to 20 mph at most, which we could really do without
When it finally clears Marvin opens up and next thing we see is the border. A very easy crossing and a few miles further there’s a petrol station with a huge car park. So we park up for the night and have beer and at 2am turn in for a good nights sleep.