I could honestly say “no” when asked if I’d ever seen anything like this before.
My quest to find the wooden architecture trail in the morning was abandoned around lunchtime when I was invited to a lovely lunch with the Esperantists in the restaurant next to the Esperanto Hotel, where they were meeting for lunch after a meeting of the Zamenhof Foundation. I had stuffed cabbage leaves with vegetables and a creamy sauce which I managed to wash down with another Porter.
Somehow, I then ended up being talked into taking a bus to the Sanctuary of Our Lady of Sorrows in Holy Water. I’d been sold this mountain with crosses on it, Swieta Woda hill, as some kind of Rio, so I was quite looking forward to it but found it rather anti-climactic in the end. Apparently it’s just like Lourdes which it would be, were Lourdes just one church on a small hill with a plethora of variously decaying crosses next to a bar — my last chance at salvation — which was shut.
Should you succeed in containing your excitement at not-a-mount of crosses that come not in all shapes but a most definitely variety of sizes, a short walk through a forest (a collection of near-identical yet somehow fascinating trees for those not in the know) will almost certainly produce the adrenaline rush that will push you over the edge.
I shouldn’t be ungrateful but I could’ve gone to Vilnius today before going starting my journey westwards on Monday. Apparently, Vilnius is really, really pretty, but if I were to go that way I’d be tempted to get myself further away from home, which would probably be a bad thing given I have to be at Lille (or somewhere that way) on Wednesday to be able to get back to Angoulême before my train turns into a pumpkin. I contemplated that over an Aperol Spritz, which cost more than it should have, and whether there’s anywhere else I need to visit before I have to get home.
