Triptych: Quiet Lake Nidzki

We're now in the self-imposed slow down of our trip: after so much sight seeing, we are taking some time to sit and enjoy the sunshine on a beautiful, quiet lake in the Masuria.

It's pretty much the way I imagined it: forests and lakes, with tiny frogs and lots of butterflies thrown in for good measure. We've seen families on mushroom-picking jaunts in the tall coniferous forests and others having picnics on grassy banks by the lake. There's a rock concert coming to the town in a few days, and it's the beginning of the season, so the hotel is still sort of warming up. A good time to be here.

Today's forecast was cloudy in the morning and sunny in the afternoon. So, we took a quick ferry ride down Lake Nidzki in the morning--not much to see, but pleasant enough. In the afternoon, once the sun came out, we asked at the reception desk if we could rent kayaks.

Not us. But you get the idea.

The people at the reception desk seem alternately very stressed and very bored. There seems to be some sort of a meeting happening here--we stole some of the snacks outside their conference room--but until today, there didn't seem to be many guests in view. (After all, the train we took to get here only started to run on July 4 for the season.) The two people we've dealt with the most are a very nice woman (who offered to do some laundry for us for free!) and a very grumpy man. We try to time things so that we are dealing with the very nice woman, of course. No matter who is helping us, I think they just make the prices up.

At any rate, we got our kayak and paddle and life-jacket and took off for a smaller version of the circuit we'd made in the morning. Drifting when our arms got tired from the wooden paddle ... speeding up a bit when it seemed like we might be in the way of a motorized boat. We saw cranes, cormorants, and some sort of fish jumping around us. It was hot in the sun, which made the lake water dripping on us from the paddles seem quite delicious.