Into the Forest

May 25, 2025 – Rytwiany – Sandomierz – 68 kms – Hotel Pod Cizemka

May 26, 2025 – Sandomierz – Pikorowy – 52kms – Trzy Stawy

May 27, 2025 – Pikorowy – Biłgoraj – 55kms – Hotel Sukcesor

Ruth: We have spent our last few days cycling through open fields filled with poppies and bachelor buttons and then dipping into forests on either a track or a paved road. Spring has arrived in Poland and it’s lush and beautiful. Most of our time we are following bike routes. We left the Vistula cycle way and now we are following a section of the Green Velo Route and it’s variant the 301. The route is well marked with great rest stations along the way.

The cycling has been going well. Right from the start I felt strong. Gord on the other hand has not been leading the charge as he usually does. Could I possibly be catching up to him, or is he actually, gulp, aging? Neither, it turns out, he has been much more peppy since he adjusted his brake pad that was dragging for a few hundred kilometres.

Gordon: I’m a little embarrassed that I let a brake pad drag for several days, but it was easier to fix than premature aging.

We are now off the tourist circuit, passing through a series of towns that are a mixture of the old and the new. It is evident that the pace of change has been breathtaking in the past 30 years, as most of the homes appear to have been built in that time. There are still many of the older squared log homes in the rural areas, but many of them have been abandoned or converted to outbuildings.

The town we are currently visiting, Biłgoraj, has a reconstruction of an enormous 17th century wooden synagogue. A plaque on the building says that the original structure, and every other wooden synagogue in the country, was torched by the Nazis during the Second World War. The population of many of these towns was 30 percent Jewish prior to the War; it is chilling to consider the horrors and change wrought by that era.