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This was our little beast with no balls for the 100km drive over the border into Poland (my only new country of the trip and Karen's fourth - she was doing pretty good)!
Outer-Berlin suburbia - very nice from what I saw!		Now if there's one thing the Krouts are good at besides persecution, it's motorways! The speed limit is generally 130km/h although that's more of a guideline based on the several cars that screamed past at upwards of 200, and in parts there's no speed limit at all! Had I remembered this, I wouldn't have hired such a gutless car.
Like most of the borders in western Europe, this one was pretty low-key. It was just a bridge over a large river (much like the Hungary/Slovakia border).
So low-key was this border in fact that if not for the GPS I probably wouldn't have realised we'd crossed it at all, at least not until seeing their road signs hehe.		To be honest I don't know an awful lot about Poland - it'll be another trip for another time, but I do believe it has some stunning geography in parts. The area we were in was fairly flat and very green; not a lot of hilly or winding roads for me to put the car through its paces.

Here we have a Polish museum...		A Polish Bar...		A Polish, whatever that big bird is...

A suburban Polish street (which reminded me somewhat of those in Hungary and Slovakia - a little run-down in parts)...		Some Polish people lapping up the Polish sun...		And a Polish road sign hehe. "Wypadki”is Polish for accidents :)

This is one of two stops I'd planned to make, based purely on 60-seconds of examining Google Maps for what was around. This is the city of Gorzów Wielkopolski (pronounce that how you will). It's apparently famous for its fine sportsmen including Olympic and world champions (probably female weightlifters).

A quick drive through didn't inspire us too much, so we just raided the first mall we came across in search of food. This one was in quite a nice little pocket of the city.				Hmm, Polish fashion - Karen was not impressed ;)

Oh hell yeah - meats and salads and chips and buns and sauces and beers, oh my! It was dirt-cheap as well; I think we paid £10 for all this.		Sweet as!

En route to stop number two, which I deliberately made sure wasn't a city. The roads here were more narrow and winding - good fun!		This is the wee town of Myślibórz (again, pronounce how you will - I went with ‘Miserly Balls').

Miserly Balls is home to just 12,000 and is situated on the southern shore of a large lake. We wandered around it, got eaten alive by insects, and could hear a lot of music coming from the other side near where we'd dumped the car.				The ruckus turned out to be some sort of fair, so we joined on in!

I'm not sure if there had been bands playing or if there was about to be bands playing or what, but it was basically just a whole lot of Poles standing around drinking Polish beer and talking Polish.		There were a few rides and whatnot for the kids, including dodgems - awesome! So I went and smashed Karen up and smashed some Polish kids up and got glared at by the parents.

The lake again at sunset before we left - gorgeous!				During the burn into Miserly Balls I could feel the car wasn't handling right at speed around bends. It felt a bit squishy for lack of a better word and I had to keep correcting my steering. Sure enough, the front tyre was flat. Between that and two speed-camera flashes (one in Poland, one in Germany), the car hire joint are going to love me ;)

The next morning we flew away in our separate directions: Karen back to Edinburgh and me back to London with easyJet who, true to form, were bloody delayed again - every time! Beforehand I devoured this sorry miserable squashed thing that looked nothing like the picture. Spot the TV Tower off in the distance as I took off from Berlin.

So that was Paris and Interlaken again (for the fourth and third time respectively), Berlin, and a taster of Poland. It's amazing how much you can comfortably cram into just eight days! Someone asked me if I've ever had such a thing as a relaxing holiday, like one where you just go lay on a beach somewhere for a week and do nothing, or stay in some resort and get massaged every day. No, I haven't;) That would be nice, but time off work is limited, money is limited, there's a lot of world to see, and I can't do that from a beach or a massage table. That's not to say there's never any relaxing; having a beer in the mountains, chilling out in front of the Berliner Dom in the sun enjoying a bit of vino, wandering around a lake in middle-of-nowhere Poland etc etc. Anyway the next couple of trips I'm planning won't be the stuff of beaches or massage tables either, more along the lines of sauerkraut and vodka, but more on that later :)

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