More from Poland

Soren has croup. He and I have both been fighting a cold since the beginning of our trip and his took a turn for the worse last night. We've been watching for it since his colds do tend to turn into croup, but last night the recognizable barking cough started. Fortunately, we are in an ideal location with the cold mountain air for him to recuperate. He's as happy and chipper as ever, but his cough sounds sad. We have a balcony in our room and we bundled him up a few times during the night to take him out to let him breath in the cold air. That helps almost immediately. So I hope he's on the mend soon.

Just in case it gets worse, we explored our doctor/hospital options this morning. We are about two blocks away from the hospital so if things don't improve, or get worse during the night (as croup tends to do) we've already planned our route to the hospital.

While we were wandering around looking for the hospital we ran into the helicopter rescue team getting ready to do a training exercise. Soren, of course, wanted to go for a ride on the helicopter and as we stood around looking at it, one of the team members came to tell us we could come take a look if we'd like to. He was a Polish doctor who spends half his time as an anethesiologist and the rest of his time as a rescue team doctor. Pretty amazing job! He was really nice, spoke great English and told us about the rescue work they do. Since this is a very popular hiking and skiing area they are called upon to rescue skiiers, hikers and climbers from all sorts of situations.

We're mostly having a slow and lazy day today. We have a great room in our log cabin hostel, so Soren played with his cars and then went down to watch some Sesame Street in the community lounge, or rather he watched SesamStrasse since it is on satellite from Germany. We ventured out for out trip to find the hospital and then had a lovely lunch (I've finally figured out how to get some non-brown foods!) before coming back for afternoon nap time.

We are planning the next leg of our journey. We are currently about 12 miles away - as the crow flies - from Zuberec, the hometown of Peter's grandparents before they immigrated to Canada so we are trying to figure out how to get there. It isn't so straightforward since we need to cross the border from Poland to Slovakia to get there, but the girls in our hostel have been helpful and seem optimistic that we can piece together a few local busses to get there. We're hoping to try on Wednesday. We'll spend today and tomorrow yet just relaxing in this lovely mountain scenery and letting Soren recover.