The bear / elk conundrum bothered me overnight so I arose at first light in order to try to spot the animals again before they went to bed. This did not please Emma, who was vociferously attached to the notion of staying in bed until well after the animals had gone to theirs.
Weathering bitter complaints and a truly disparaging barrage, I dutifully began thermal imaging and scoping. Bottom line: the bears were a bust. I spotted very similar heat signatures to last night's but this time was able to get the scope on the animals in question: the animals I saw were red deer.
Compounding the disappointment was the fact that last night's stopover was badly judged. We'd anticipated that the mountain pass we were on would not be subject to passing traffic once daylight faded. We were wrong. Vehicles passed by sporadically the whole night through. Some you just plain lose...
On the plus side, the trail cam caught some really good videos of a red fox.
And so, to the morning's drive. Well, that too was pretty disappointing. We were soon over the border and back into Poland and pretty much the whole morning thereafter was a dreary affair spent endlessly queuing in traffic through innumerable seemingly identical dreary Polish towns that melded... drearily - one into the next.
Post lunch we compounded the underlying disappointments and dullness and added a pinch of the self-inflicted harrowing by visiting the prisons, workhouses and concentration camps of Auschwitz.
We parked the truck short of the complex and maximised mobility around the various sites by employing the bikes. This worked well. Formal visits take about four hours, need to be pre-booked, and waiting lists are long.
We didn't pursue such a formal visit but didn't need to, either. Actually, neither did I personally didn't want to. For me, mere proximity was sufficient.
The bikes allowed us to view all of the salient sites from outwith the various compounds at our own pace and in our own time. Of course, the backstories surrounding the whole wretched area are well documented and, these days, only a reverse-image internet search away.
That's what we did around the place: what more can an insignificant member of humankind productively say about it?
Brightening things up a little, when we returned to the truck we were approached by an exceptionally polite and unassuming young couple who were fascinated by the vehicle. They explained (in perfect English) that they had travelling aspirations and were such thoroughly decent people that we accommodated a guided tour.
Seeds sown, we left the infamous suburbs and bumbled to where we are now; a point chosen from map features that... ahem, is purely coincidentally next to some railway sidings and some good heavy loco activity.
Post composed at 22:00 on Sunday 17th August from our intended overnighting spot N 49.90816°, E 18.93186° / http://maps.google.com/maps?q=loc:49.90816%2C18.931