The High Tatras

On our arrival at the Poprad train station, we were greeted by a large contingent of relations eager to see Tessie (and possibly the people she brought with her). For once, we actually had more people available than pieces of luggage. Everyone pitched in and we made the short walk to the apartment of our hosts Peter and Danka and their daughters Zuzka and Andrejka.

For the rest of the first day our hosts took it easy on us, and we spent the remainder of the afternoon catching up with each other and watching the Olympics on television. Danka prepared a hearty meal for us in mid.afternoon, and it abated our hunger until we went to sleep that night.

Tessie got to know her cousins (well, second cousins actually, but we°re not about to keep score) and they played together on the apartment complex playground. The two young ladies are very eager to be helpful and take turns pushing Tessie°s stroller around.

The next day, we all went to the local mountains, the High Tatras. We walked from the apartment back to the train station where we had arrived the day before and boarded a small regional light rail line that took us to the Tatranský národný park (Tatra Mountains National Park). Imagine that: public transportation to a national park! We disembarked and made a beeline for the local ice cream shop, figuring we°d burn off the calories later.

A short trek later, we happened upon a mini golf course, and the two young ladies were so enthralled with the idea that we decided to indulge them. Andrejka won, Tessie°s Mom took second, I got third, and Zuzka, well, it wasn°t her day. (The other members of our party, Petr, Danka and Tessies Moms Dad, abstained from ritual self humiliation.)

What°s a round of golf without a beer afterward at the nineteenth hole? Well, the course only had fifteen holes, and one of those was closed for repairs (which is how we all broke par, by the way), but we didn´t let that stop us.

After that, we kept walking until we came to the park museum, which was about to close for the day, so the kindly ticket seller let us all in for free. The fifteen minutes we spent inside were probably at the limit of Tessies attention span anyway, so it all worked out for the best. She saw and identified several species of animals (stuffed museum displays, of course), including several we didnt know she knew.

After that, the older girls tried the mountain bobsled, and Zuzka even dared the ATV couse. Is this not sounding much like a typical North American National Park? There seems to be a different attitude here toward park concessions, and a variety of entrepreneurial enterprises have opened up to separate tourists from their cash. This is nothing new of course from our more familiar national parks; its just that here the concessions are inside the parks boundaries rather than clustered at the entrances. We saw license plates from Poland, Hungary, Denmark, and even Latvia and Lithuania in the parking lots, so these concessionaires are drawing them in from all over.

Nature got the last word, however, when as we heading for our train we stopped to watch a large deer. Of course, the deer was soon chased back into the wood by another visitors Jack Russell terrier, so maybe its not so clear who got the last word after all.

(Editorial note: this post, the previous post, and very likely the next few to follow, will be a mess. Im using a Slovak keyboard, which, in addition to switching the positions of z and y, has characters like ô, í, á, č and many, many others more readily available than, say, an apostrophe, which you the reader may have noticed is either missing from several words above or replaced with a °, which, I admit is suboptimal. Just bear with me and Ill clean it all up when we get home.)