This is part three of a tale about driving from the UK to Estonia. If you missed parts one and two, and want to start from the beginning, it can be found by clicking this link: Road Trip From the UK to Estonia.
Day Two: We leave Berlin bright and early, we are heading for the border of Poland. That doesn’t take too long and pretty soon we are in Poland.
Poland: Trucks, Tractors and Trees.
This route through Poland is the main pass through route for road freight to the rest of Poland, Belarus, Kaliningrad, Ukraine and the Baltics. As you can imagine, it gets very busy and is trucks, trucks and more trucks.
The EU paid for a new motorway that is now several hundred miles long.
It is a pay road, and you now pay five times along its length, which varies between 14 and 37 Zloty at each point.
Bringing damaged cars up to Poland and Lithuania from other parts of Europe is still big business.
You see scenes like this every few minutes. And the empty transporters coming back on the other side of the carriageway to collect more. It has always been this way. Almost every used car in this part of the world arrived as a damaged one from western Europe.
When driving through the towns and villages, there are these religious thingies in front of many of the fields of crops.
I can only assume they are hoping god will bless the crop? I dunno. Some are little crosses with a few flowers. Some are more extravagant affairs like this. Some are huge monstrosities with floodlights and Madonnas – looking more like graves than shrines. This is a Catholic thing, not an Orthodox thing.
Starting in East Germany, and right through Poland, there is a lot of graffiti.
Its under every motorway bridge, on garages, public areas – everywhere.
Some are intricate cartoons, some is very artistic, and I half wonder if some of it might have been paid for to brighten up the dull concrete.
The usual roadside sellers can still be found.
Don’t ask me how this got here………..
It made me chuckle so I put it here.
It took around 12 hours for me to get where I was heading for the night: The Kamiza Hotel. The hotel is nice, it is very, very cheap, and as one might expect, service is almost non existent. Well, this is Eastern Europe. They haven’t grasped service yet.
Tomorrow is still about three hours driving in Poland before the border of Lithuania; the entrance to the former Soviet Union.