The Tough Guy Challenge began a few years back on the eve of the International Women’s Day. As the story goes, my buddy Robert and his then-roommate were asked to leave the flat so that the girls could celebrate their day by having a girls night in. Unfortunately for these guys, they came home too…
Meringue Burgers and Donuts
It’s never too late to write about something sweet, right? After all, Thursday wasn’t that long ago anyway, and it being a Fat Thursday to boot, I think it deserves an honorable mention for this week. Not that getting my face stuffed with sugar deserves honorable mentions. But Ania made some pretty cool meringues for…
Morning Routine
I started this blog entry by researching all sorts of laws of occurrence and repeatability and about thirty minutes into it I lost track of what I wanted to say while staring at a page for the Laws of the Mind… What I wanted to write about today was my new morning routine. For the…
Snow Hiking
The Big Owl mountain is only 1,015m above sea level (3,330feet) but it is fairly nearby and it has a cool lighthouse looking observation tower built in 1906 atop of it. Whenever we feel like getting out of the house to do some moderate snow hiking, the Big Owl is our go-to destination. The views…
Age of Illusion
Illusion is a Polish heavy metal band formed in 1992. Given that I was 10 at the time, and that I left Poland to live in the States just two years later, I never listened to Polish metal, nor have I ever heard of a band called Illusion. Until I met my wife. At the…
The 10-Year Challenge – A Retrospective
I’m turning 37 years old tomorrow. Yikes! And while I haven’t really thought about it too much before, for some reason this year I’m approaching that 37-year mark with a little more caution. Maybe it’s just me getting wiser, or so I hope anyway, but I did spend the last couple of evenings reminiscing of…
Sunday Night Post
This week’s been relatively calm so when my phone reminded me of my self imposed blog-post-deadline late this Sunday afternoon…absolutely no post topic came to mind. I have set this post deadline to force myself into some kind of creative writing for at least a few minutes every week. Don’t get me wrong, as a…
Canadian, Eh?
Every now and again I get the urge to make me some pancakes. Ania will sometimes make the traditional Polish ones, but Polish pancakes, also known as ‘neleśniki’, are just not the same. They’re mostly very thin and you actually roll them or fold them into triangles with your choice of filling be that fruit…
Half Plus Three
Yesterday I ran my first half-marathon of the year, but it was a ‘first’ in a few other ways, too. It was my first half-marathon in the winter time. Snow, mud, ice and all. It was my first marathon in the mountains. An elevation difference of only about 600meters, but still 600meters more than the…
Snowed In
Yesterday was Wroclaw’s first real snow day of the season and the city freaked out. Perhaps it didn’t freak out as much as it simply shut itself down. And that shouldn’t happen in Poland in the winter time. It’s only natural that we associated winter with snow. I know, I know, but in Poland that…
My 2018 – A Google Photos Review
I’m a big fan of Google Photos. Even though I should probably be an Apple Photos person, given my Apple hardware usage, somehow Google Photos was first to the punch for me with cloud-based photo storage and it just stuck. I especially love how all my photos from my phone, computer, camera, and even sent…
Dresden Christmas Market 2018 Edition
In case you missed my write up of the Dresden Christmas Market last year, we went back this year to do it all over again. Mostly because Ania loves Christmas a lot, but perhaps also because we really missed that cheese and mushroom hot sandwich they serve there. Again, it’s only a three-hour drive at…
Breaking The Chain
Jerry Seinfeld had a pretty good life hack back in his days in order to become a better comic. He put up a calendar on the wall and with a red marker he crossed out each day he wrote a joke. The goal was to write one joke each day. Write a joke, mark it…
The Long Way Back – Przemyśl, Łańcut, and Sandomierz
While our Transalp test ride was mainly geared towards the Bieszczady area of south-east Poland, we had scheduled our return path a little differently to cover more of the unknown. Having never been to the cities of Przemyśl, Łancut, or Sandomierz, we decided to do a quick drive by, even if for a minute. First…
Transalping Around – Bieszczady Edition
The idea behind getting back into riding the Transalp was to do at least one epic run a season. Now the jury is still out on what exactly would deem a ride ‘epic’, but right away my imagination started running wild. Romania, Bulgaria, Croatia, no, screw that, Albania! It’s all just a few thousand kilometers…
Back in the Saddle
The Cracow trip described in the previous post wasn’t exactly a sightseeing trip from the get-go. The real purpose of the trip was, in fact, to check out a motorcycle I had found online and considered buying. The owner of the motorcycle had said that he will be available in the late afternoon, giving us a better…
A Day in Cracow
Back in March, we took a quick day trip to Cracow or Kraków in Polish. It’s only a 275km (168miles) ride, and it’s all highway all the way there. Without a specific plan or city tour in mind, we simply started walking all around admiring this great city. Ohh, and of course Fado came along,…
I Just Felt Like Running
Today was a pretty big milestone for me fitness-wise. I ran 21km’s (13.10mi) which is exactly half of a marathon. I also did it in an official event, the H2O Wrocław half marathon. Name tags, medals, an all. Given that I am somewhat overweight, simply finishing a half marathon is quite a feat for me….
Saxon Switzerland
“Wait. You went to Switzerland? In Germany?” Yes. And no. Let me explain. Saxon Switzerland is a national park around the Elbe river valley south-east of Dresden, Germany. In 1766 two Swiss artists were appointed to the Dresden Academy of Arts, and in their letters back home they described their new place of residence as…
Burg Stolpen
I seem to have a pretty weird luck when it comes to renting Airbnb flats for us and our dog Fado. A few years back I found a place on the Polish seaside that turned out to be a murder crime scene some years earlier. In San Francisco, I found a great apartment smack in…
The Polish Magician 