The road was sticky today but never the less the trip went fast. The distance was a little long alone but the next step into Ukraine Emmanuelle will be by my side again.

In the exit of the town of Radom I had stopped to oil my bike which was making a little noise but I have found that a little noise over 100 km eats at you. The sound becomes a mantra and your focus gets turned away from the road. In Poland the roads are only big enough to hold two trucks and a biker semi comfortably side by side but when someone makes a wrong judgment of space or there is a sudden lapse of pavement, one of us has to leave the road. This someone is usually me who ends up in the ditch or a bush. So you can see that a small noise that comes from the lower rear sprocket on the back wheel could cause a little problem.

I had arrived into town early and met Emmanuelle for a drink downtown in the center of Lublin which turned out to be a university town. The town is a lot calmer than the last couple of towns. We met with one of the locals who explained that the Russian influence is greater on the east side of Poland than the left which has a strong influence of the Germans.

Paul explained all that we should have known before we entered Poland. He gave us the necessary words to order food and say thank you and he actually spelled them phonetically for us on the back of a napkin (which we will try to send to us about a week ago when we entered the country). Paul gave us an address for an empty dorm in the university which turned out to be an excellent deal.

We said our goodbyes and proceeded to our dorm to drop off the bags so we could tour a little in the town. The town is huge so we only covered about a quarter of it. Most of the time was spent looking for camp fuel for the stove which no one here seems to know anything about. We got stopped in the rain late in the afternoon but it didn’t last too long.

The rain was welcomed because this heat is too much for me and I hold close the first days of the trip when it was raining all day with a high of 20 degrees. That was a little shocking at first but I learned to like it because at least it wasn’t 36 degrees. I hope it snows tomorrow.

We were sorry to leave our comfortable apartment suite of Radom but it was time to move on. I took the train to Lublin a 6 am. For once there was a whole train cart dedicated to bikes like me. For the first time, I felt part of a whole.

A couple of hours later, I was at Lublin station which gave me the impression that I had stepped into a clean, safe city.

Chris joined me some 5 hours later and the usual ritual of looking for a place to sleep began. This is never an easy task when you don’t know a city. All hotels were way beyond our budget. Tired and thirsty, we decided to take a break in a cafe on a terrace. It’s when we met Paul that the wind of change brought us good luck. Paul is a polish citizen, a local resident of Lublin who had moved to Warsaw. Paul had traveled in Spain and was about to take another trip to Italy by bike with his girlfriend. You could tell he was very much enjoying meeting different people and cultures. Paul is a very interesting man that told us about Polish culture and language, allowing us to better understand Polish. Too bad we had to wait till the last stop in Poland, to realize who the Polish are. Paul also indicated the address of the university dorm. That was so helpful.

After taking pictures and exchanging web addresses, Chris and I pursued our quest for a home for the night. Thanks to Paul's explanations, we found the university dorm of Lublin.

For 20 bucks, we were given a rather comfortable room with bathroom and shower. Exhausted we passed out on the bed to finally wake up later in the evening to grab a few groceries for supper. Chris desperately tried to find some low pressure gas for our stove but unfortunately, he only found rubbing alcohol. We thought maybe we should try to light it with vodka. It s cheap like borsht after all!