730am: we hear loudspeakers playing to the little town...Pol thought there was a protest on...it turns out there are speakers connected to light poles around this town!!! In between the music, there were town announcements for the day eg. birthdays, shop sales, deaths!!!! A quick breakky...waitress didn't speak English so Pol tried to communicate in Russian...Ros put her order in with Pol and Pol managed to gesticulate her way through. So many roadworks…and these automatic roadwork lights don’t change very fast!!!! …more road works and one way streets…and stuck behind this truck! we were’t going anywhere…anytime soon!! …still stuck in traffic!! The countdown timer on the GPS is taking a while to go down… …more selfies…waiting for roadwork lights to change!! Poland!!! Border crossing was easy!! Great roads – very brightly painted…and windy...we noticed that out of the places we've travelled so far - Poles are definitely the slowest drivers!! People swimming! …getting closer… …lunch stop! The GPS didn’t recognise the hotel’s addres we’re staying at so we planned on stopping and looking it up on our phones…so that is what we did… on our way to our hotel…this is a good one!... We missed the road the first time around!!!....very easy to miss.. we saw a deer here too but didn’t get the camera out in time to take a pic!! …you can see a little of the hotel… …Ros found an old hunters old lodge. This place has only 15 rooms with grand facilities both inside and out... Animal heads on nearly every part of the walls! It was situated close to a lake with nothing but nature surrounding it. The style of the place has been kept to the period it was built in - 1861. Amazing! The room key looks like the original old style key...one of the hotel's policy is to leave the key at reception when leaving the grounds! We also booked a ticket to get into Auschwitz (which is free of charge - but we had to book due to the massive number of visitors there each day). We were disappointed there were no English tours left and had to take the individual tour option where we had to figure things out ourselves. There we had to go through security checks - just like airport security before entering...and once in..... we thought there were free audio headsets for individual tours so we picked up two headsets....and asked a girl near us how they work...she was in an English speaking tour and said they were for the tours only...so we jumped on the end of their tour and manage to get an English tour after all! That was Auschwitz 1 (There are 3 concentration camps in this town in total). Auschwitz 1 has most of it's buildings still in tact, the Nazis didn't bother destroying it as they did with Auschwitz Birkenau to try and hide what happened. We walked with the tour for around 2 hours. It was incredibly sad. At the end you walked through the gas chamber which was chilling to think of all the people that were killed inside. After the tour we went onto Auschwitz Birkenau (Auschwitz 2). This is the camp that is more commonly known (with the railway track going straight in through the main entrance). We walked around here for a couple of hours. As it was quite late there were barely any people around. Lots of the buildings here were destroyed when the Nazis realised they had been defeated. They had a big memorial at the end of the train track. This is a memorial for those that died and were buried here. There were multiple areas where bodies (ashes) were thrown into big pits. The infamous train track that drove prisoners straight into the camp. We had a table booked for dinner at the hotel for 8pm, but we didn't end up leaving Auschwitz Birkenau until 8ish and we had a 30minute drive ahead of us. Dinner was very yum!