An epic attempt to escape Vilnius

Well, the Poland plan started well. On arriving in Vilnius we got the rental car returned and walked to the bus station, queued for 40 minutes, then bought a ticket with Ecolines to Krakow for the following evening.

We spent the next day traipsing about the city tracking down extra things we needed (such as the bike boxes the ticket lady assured us we would have to pack our bikes in) and cleaning our bikes. Come 8pm we set off to the train station with the assistance of a couple of others from the hostel to help carry the bike boxes (they were catching an earlier bus, and it made life easier to go with them so we could help carry each others gear).

8.20pm and we were at the bus station, busily packing our bikes away. 9pm and everything was neatly packed and taped up. We sat and waited. The bus was supposed to come at 10.30pm. It didn’t.

On the plus side a group of salsa dancing friends turned up with a boombox to farewell one of their number, so we had a salsa dancing circle going on in full force in front of us. The security guard was baffled, but let them be.

Some time after 11pm the bus turned up. They took one look at the bike boxes, and said “No”. Pointing at our other luggage, they said “This yes. The other, no. Bus full, no room.” It was an enormous double decker thing, packed with people and with very little luggage room. We were told there might be some hope if the bikes weren’t in boxes, but even then probably not, and that they would write on our tickets that we’d cancelled our trip so we might be able to get 50% back at the office the next day.

We muttered quite a lot, confirmed that none of the other buses leaving that night were going anywhere we had visas for (mostly Russia) or wanted to go (northern Lithuania) reassembled the bikes, and went back to sleep in the hostel courtyard, where we proceeded to get rained on and not sleep much.

Come 6am we set off back to the bus station to check out our options. We had no desire to buy another ticket for a bus that might not take our bikes – despite the fact most of the buses seemed to have heaps of luggage space. There was one at 11am for Warsaw, so we went to check out the train station in the meantime. We’d avoided it initially as it seemed like there was a lot of train changing involved, and trains tend to be more expensive. But there was a 12pm train to Warsaw that was cheaper than the bus, and the cost was conveniently covered by our bus ticket refund, with enough money leftover to buy us some food (handy, as we’d spent all of our Lithuanian money the day before in anticipation of leaving the country).

The train was a breeze – the first one had bike hooks opposite our seats, the second (a gauge change from broad to narrow before leaving Lithuania) had an entire carriage full of bike hooks, and Harry Potter type cabins (a novelty for us). And we didn’t need the damn bike boxes.

 

On the Hogwarts Express from Lithuania to Poland

 

We arrived in Warsaw at 8.30pm, determined to jump on the first train we could find. Which ended up being the 9pm to Prague. Fine, we said, Prague would do, please give us tickets for ourselves and our bikes for the Prague train.

When the train turned up, we were thrown onto the non-sleeper Prague section of the train, and told there was nowhere to put our bikes. Well, actually, the conductor just waved us towards a cabin with seats and went back to the sleeper carriage. After sitting with bikes and luggage piled up outside the bathroom at the far end of the carriage, we eventually managed to get a free cabin to ourselves, wheeled the bikes in, and had a row of seats each to sleep on. Brilliant! Many thanks to the one lady occupying the cabin who happily moved when she saw the bikes. I’m not sure how we would have spent the night otherwise.

 

I spent about half an hour staring at this sign, trapped under a pile of bikes and luggage.