Do you know where Ostrołęka is?
Well, you probably don’t. And neither did I until I found it on a map. It’s an, I would say, average sized town in the north-east of Poland, about a hundred kilometres from Warsaw. That’s where I was going to in the morning when everything went wrong. My brother’s-in-law brother had to go there just to pick up some stupid documents and he asked me and his other brother to keep him company. We set off at 5:30 in the morning and headed for, at least that’s what we thought, Ostrołęka. Mio, the sat nav with a pretty voice and still imperfect grammar was showing us the way. She had been programmed the night before and was supposed to take the shortest way. I had a traditional map as well, just to see how well she was doing. And she was indeed. Until we realised that instead of going north, she was taking us straight into Warsaw. We had our doubts and decided to call my sister’s husband to ask if she knew (Mio) what she was doing. He managed to convince us to trust her no matter what. And so we drove into Warsaw, which of course was the wrong direction, had a ride along the ring and stopped on the opposite site of the city. The screen was showing that there were just a few kilometres left, but it didn’t look so on the map. Despite this, we followed her directions and went into an uncharted territory. What we found, were tiny villages connected by strings of even tinier roads and it certainly didn’t look like a place where the Municipal Council could be found. When Mio, who by then had been cursed and shouted at by us, announced that we had arrived at our destination, all we could see was an old village, with the village leader’s house, a church and a monument. We decided we had to get out of there and go to the ‘proper’ Ostrołęka as quickly as possible, cause we were running out of time. This wasn’t so easy though, as there were more than just two places with this name. So, it seemed like a good idea to choose a village near our Ostrołęka and just go there. It worked quite well, we were going northwards, in the right direction, until we stopped in another village quite far from our destination. This was tiny and there was no way you could find it on a map. I ask myself why the sat nav had this hole in its memory and not the other one, which was much bigger. We nicely refused to continue making use of her services and went on according to the map. After several minutes of almost carefree driving, we got stuck in a traffic jam. Having stood there almost motionlessly, all of us agreed to turn back and go another way. To make this already long story short, I will just say that we spent about one hour driving through the many villages and along dirt roads. We didn’t make it on time to the office, but eventually found another person who could go there and get things done in a few days.
Throughout the way, I was taking pictures, which you can see below, from the car. All told, there are 225 of them, but I only selected a few. Thankfully, our journey back home was devoid of any surprises and Mio did a first-class job. I was home after 18 hours.
Full sized gallery here.
Oh, and we miraculously avoided getting a ticket for speeding (48km/h over the limit :)
