Okay, we have a lot to cover here so I’m typing as fast as I can. To recap, the Fall of ’26 Road Trip I took with my son Luke started in Wroclaw, Poland, made a stop in Auschwitz, and then on to a couple of nights in Kraków⁩, where I’ve already been. I even booked a room in the same Holiday Inn near the Kraków⁩ Town Square I stayed at the last time because I was so impressed with it, and the location is perfect. It’s definitely not your usual rundown two-star American Holiday Inn.

Here’s the town square one more time (my last visit to Kraków⁩ was chronicled in this baldsasquatch entry.) Luke, being a refreshingly considerate companion, encouraged us to visit places I hadn’t seen the first time. So we only did a quick run-through of the town square, which is a lot like the one in Wroclaw, which, coincidentally, is a lot like the one in Kraków⁩.

The main difference between walking around Kraków⁩ with Luke and walking around with a woman, aside from the increase in facial hair, is that I learned there is a whole underground adult vibe going on I was oblivious to during the previous visit. While walking around the tourist area, we were approached regularly by mostly young women coquettishly asking if we’d like to go to their particular bar. After some light-hearted banter we discovered that the bars were generally topless venues, and with even more conversation, some of them offered up hints that things could get really spicy if we wanted. Needless to say, we declined all invitations, but it amazed me to find out just what kinds of things one might be oblivious to when visiting a foreign city, since previously I had no idea at all that was all going on there. None of those bars had storefronts we could see, so I suppose the system of keeping them hidden and underground and employing street promoters to bring in the business keeps the area looking a lot better than having a bunch of X-rated neon signs everywhere. Still, the whole thing felt very scammy, so I wouldn’t recommend being enticed by their sales pitch. That said, we never felt unsafe anywhere we walked in Kraków⁩, but perhaps mostly because we refused to walk down dark stairways into sketchy places.

One of the places I hadn’t seen the first time was the Kraków Ghetto wall. The wall was a barrier built by the Nazis in 1941 to enclose the Jewish Residential District in the Podgórze neighborhood. Its distinctive curved top was designed to resemble Jewish gravestones, because making people miserable and then killing them just because they were Jewish wasn’t enough, they had to mock them as well. The living conditions inside were appalling and desperate, until in 1942 the Kraków⁩ Ghetto was closed and all of its inhabitants were sent to concentration camps.

‎⁨The Ghetto Heroes Square⁩, as it’s now named, was located within the boundaries of the Kraków Ghetto between 1941 and 1943. It’s where they gathered the Jews prior to their deportation to concentration camps. In 2005, the bus station was demolished and rebuilt, and they turned the whole square into a monument, including a memorial bus station and 70 oversized chairs, which is a permanent art exhibit to commemorate the furniture that was carried out from the Jewish houses after they cleared out the ghetto.

Nearby is Schindler’s Factory, made famous in the movie The Bucket List, starring Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman as two terminal cancer patients checking off their bucket list wishes before– oh wait, that’s the wrong movie. I’m pretty sure the film is called Schindler’s List. Somebody get me a new intern, stat!

I don’t mean to disparage the Schindler Museum in any way by saying the following, but while I found the museum to be interesting, polished and professional, the Schindler connection is really a marketing tool more than anything. While the museum does reside in part of the old Schindler factory, the thing could have been anywhere and had the exact same exhibits and few would think of it as The Schindler Museum. But the ties to the movie and the name recognition bring in the tourists by the droves, so hats off to them for clever marketing. In the end, I guess they didn’t need to retell the story as told in the movie, I just thought there’d be more Schindlering.

They had the usual World War II armaments, propaganda, and history on display. As I get older, looking down the barrel of a gun isn’t as scary as it used to be. Besides, it’s a pretty good metaphor for a lot of the crazy things going on in the world today. I guess that makes my noggin the planet.

Truthfully, it’s not as if they completely ignored the Schindler story; for instance, the collection of pots and pans above were an example of what the factory churned out during the war. I guess I just thought I’d meet Liam Neeson and get an autograph or selfie, so not having him there surprised me since it’s one of his best roles and I would think he’d love to bask in the glow of all his fans daily. Surprisingly, they refused to give me a refund when I complained about the Liamlessness.

You know when a government is aiming to dominate and subjugate a population when they start attacking education. So in your country, if you ever see things like the defunding of education, the banning of books, calling a college education a “scam,” or hiring the former head of, just spitballin’ here, something stupid and fake like a professional wrestling organization to run your Department of Education, it means they really do not have the best interests of the majority of your country’s people in mind. Pay attention to history. Just sayin’.

I thought it was kind of a strange juxtaposition to have all these figurines on display featuring Hitler and people being arrested right next to one depicting Joseph and Mary along with little Jesus. I don’t know about y’all, but if I went to someone’s house on Christmas and saw all of this together, I’d probably end up getting arrested for saying things I shouldn’t.

Speaking of which, did you know the Nazis depicted Jesus as non-Jewish? They invented a pseudo-historical narrative that reimagined Jesus as an “Aryan” warrior who fought against the Jews.

The Torn Hearts Monument on the left, officially known as the Memorial to the Victims of Fascism in Kraków, is not far from the Schindler Museum. It occupies a prominent position on the historic grounds of the former Kraków-Płaszów Concentration Camp (which are largely barren) in the southern part of the city.

Also nearby stands the infamous “Grey House,” where Camp Commandant Amon Göth maintained his office and was notorious for taking potshots at prisoners working below. This brutality was explicitly depicted in Schindler’s List, although the film contains a historical discrepancy: the Grey House was portrayed as the setting of Göth’s villa, when in reality it housed his office. The building also served as living quarters for SS officers stationed at the camp, including several who became notorious for their cruelty toward prisoners.

For the prisoners, the building was a house of horrors. Its basement contained solitary confinement cells, including so-called “standing bunkers,” which were tiny cells so cramped that prisoners could not even sit down. Survivors reported that few inmates who entered the Grey House ever emerged again.

Today, the Grey House is one of the few structures associated with the former concentration camp that remains standing. Remarkably, it has remained largely unaltered since the war. Plans are underway to eventually open the building to the public as a museum, preserving it as a reminder of the atrocities committed at Płaszów.

We departed Kraków with more Krakóvian sights added to my memory banks, as well as one of the best Chinese food dinners we’ve ever had added to our stomachs. Speaking of cramming calories down our gullets, while driving to our next destination in Slovakia, we stopped in for a quick roadside bite at Popeyes Louisiana Kitchen. Just look at the size of that cup overflowing with dipping sauce. I mean, American fast food is famously unhealthy already, but that’s a heart attack in a cup! I look at all that yellow goo and just picture it as sludge in your veins. Gross! Anyway, Luke and I each finished one off and it was pretty good, all the way down to scraping the bottom with my finger. Yum yum! It was so good I ordered another one and asked for a straw so I could drink it on the goo, er, go.

In southern Poland we passed by the Niedzica Castle (also known as Dunajec Castle in case you can’t pronounce Niedzica), built between the years 1320 and 1326. It is a beautiful area with a nice dam and a beautiful lake right near the border with Slovakia. But since we were headed to ⁨Košice⁩ in Slovakia, and wanted to get there before dark because that’s when all the vampires come out, we didn’t do much more than get out of the car and admire the views.

Along the way we just had to stop at this local potato festival, which became one more thing crossed off my bucket list. Who doesn’t want to go to a potato festival? They had bins of potatoes from individual farmers (I confess that I’d have a hard time tasting the difference between most potatoes, so I thought it was a little bit amusing), some good old-fashioned folk singin’ and dancin’ on stage, and Luke got to meet the real Mr. Potato Head, who I suspect wasn’t really a potato. We also checked out a drone, but they wouldn’t give us an answer to our question as to how much it would cost to add a grenade dropper attachment. After all, we were only 145 kilometers (90 miles) from the Ukrainian border, and would have loved to help them out against that monster Putin. Alas, the only weapons we might have been able to provide the Ukrainians were potatoes, which are really mostly a weapon of last resort.

About an hour away from Košice⁩ is a castle called Spiš Castle, (the Spiš is pronounced “speesh”) built at the beginning of the 12th century. Since I now know how that “š” is pronounced, I guess that makes “šit” is a bad word.

Spiš Castle is essentially a ruin now, but back in the day it was quite prominent. But along with all its hustle and bustle, it also had a brutal torture chamber, so you could describe the place either way as a little šitty.

It is one of the six largest castle šites in Slovakia, and not only features wonderful views, but has a lightning rod on top with a warning to beware of lightning, as well as another sign that basically says you’re taking your life into your hands if you wander around the castle. But we gladly risked our lives for the sake of ol’ baldsasquatch.com!

The last owners of the Spiš Castle, the Csáky family, abandoned the castle in the early 1700s because they considered it too uncomfortable to live in (as demonstrated by that plush and roomy stairway). In 1780, the castle was destroyed by a fire, but was partly reconstructed in the latter half of the twentieth century.

Like virtually all castles, its history of attacks, conquest, torture, and more are complex and interesting. That said, roughly 150,000 European castles have been built over the years, each of them with a story to tell, usually a long one. About 46,000 of these remain standing in various states of repair. I figured I only have about 45,902 to go before I see ’em all, but after I did the math I realized that if I have ten years left of traveling, I’d have to see about 13 of them a day to get them all in, and that’s with no days off. Shoot. Might not get to all of them then.

We spent the night in Košice, Slovakia. Košice is pronounced “KO-sheet-seh,” although that’s just the modern take. Historically, the city was also known as: Kaschau (in German), Kassa (in Hungarian), Kaşa (in Turkish), Cassovia (in Latin), Cassovie (in French), Cașovia (in Romanian), Кошице (in Russian, Ukrainian, and Rusyn), Koszyce (in Polish), Kashoy (in Yiddish), and more. Since they’re all hard to pronounce we just called it “Fred.”

With a population of about 230,000, Fred– er, Košice, is the largest city in eastern Slovakia and the second largest city in Slovakia, after the capital Bratislava, which makes that the first biggest city in Slovakia if my math is correct.

Košice has a large and vibrant historical center, which we enjoyed walking through with the limited time we had. We were also able to score a very nice, filling meal (but sadly, without the gallon ‘o dipping cheese) served by a friendly waitress who spoke great English, as did most of the people we encountered. Which is good, because my Košician is pretty rusty.

A colorful fountain in the square provides a beautiful addition to the area.

Since its founding, Košice has belonged to at least six distinct sovereign countries and principalities, including the Kingdom of Hungary starting in 1000, Eastern Hungarian Kingdom & Transylvanian Suzerainty (whatever that is), the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the First Czechoslovakia, the Kingdom of Hungary again during world War II (later occupied by Nazi Germany), the Second Czechoslovakia, and now in present day Slovakia, which I suppose doesn’t get to be called the First Slovakia until there is a second one.

Following the Nazi takeover of Hungary, the entire Jewish community of Košice—numbering roughly 12,000 people—along with 2,000 individuals from the adjacent regions, was systematically rounded up, packed into cattle cars, and sent to Nazi death camps where they were murdered. During this tragic period, a local internment camp operated within the city under the brutal command of Hungarian official László Csatáry (1915–2013).

With Košice under our belts. we woke up the next morning, looked at our maps, and decided to roll the dice and cross the border into Ukraine. In the next post you’ll find out whether or not we made it out alive.

(Scroll down to see previous entries.)