Slovakia

We are beginning to believe that you can tell the wealth of a country by the state of the roads (may even be a better measure than the Big Mac Index).

Leaving Krakow this morning for the 5 hr trip to Kosice, the 2nd largest city in Slovakia, we blasted along a new Polish motorway how ever it was so new that Mrs GPS had not caught up with the changes and as a consequence she missed the exit to the E85 to Slovakia - I say missed because she was telling us to exit the motorway in 600m when in fact the exit was 200m closer so we sailed on passed the exit.

It was about 20k of driving to the next exit before we could make a correction and we gingerly drove in what we thought was an easterly direction until Mrs GPS took over and brought us through to Kosice.

At noon we crossed the Polish/Slovakian border and stopped immediately to buy the vignette that allows us to travel on Slovakian roads - given the state of the roads we soon wondered why we paid anything, they were rutted, badly repaired, etc.

However we finally arrived here to our rebooked accommodation which is more than adequate.

After booking in we ventured out to look at the sights.

It is Saturday here and the place is as dead as the proverbial dodo - it has the Main Street (Ulica Hlavna) and all of the sights are in or near to this street.

It is a pedestrian only zone with sidewalk cafes almost the length of it which I estimate to be around 500m.

The first historic building we saw was the University Church built in 1681 and was


soon followed by St Elizabeth's Cathedral a Gothic style church, the largest in Slovakia and which took over 100 yrs to construct starting in the late 1400s


Today there was a vintage car display in the city as one area on Hlvana was lined


with these graceful machines.

Near the State Theatre there is the Singing Fountain, a water show to music


and then there is a statute,The Immaculta and so it goes on with some 22 historic


or "tourist" sites in the area!

To get to Budapest we needed to make a stopover & Kosice happened to be it!

I'm told that in yesterday's blog I wrote that at the Salt Mine we were 135kms underground - that was a deliberate mistake as the astute among you would have realised as kms should have been ms!