Right now the chorus to the Rolling Stones song “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” is stuck in my head.  Let me take you through our day today.

Today was a travel day.  However, unlike every other travel day, there really was no plan on what time we were leaving and exactly where we were going.  That typically is not my style and I was slightly more anxious today than usual.  We had purchased plane tickets for Saturday back to Koszalin (the city where my in-laws live), but the airline unexpectedly went out of business last week and did not provide any refunds.  We found an airline that was willing to match the price we purchased the tickets for, but you had to be there in person, you could not process the transaction online or over the phone.

When we left this morning, I had no idea where I’d be resting my head tonight.  If it would be somewhere in Krakow or on a 14-hour Polish train ride.  I really do not like traveling by train, so I spent the day hoping things would go smoothly at the airport.  My hoping paid off and surprisingly things worked out with the airline and I am not spending the night on a Polish train.

The downside of the evening is that since we really had no idea how things would play out, we had no place to stay in Krakow.  The lady who we rented a place from in Zakopane recommended a place to stay in Krakow.  Somehow we ended up at a hostel.  It was only after we checked in that we learned there is a hotel nearby with the same name as this hostel…

It is a really hot night here and Michal and I are on the very top floor in a tiny room with a tiny window.  It’s sort of like a box that you could easily suffocate in.  Thankfully there is a fan though.  Oh and a skylight window right over the bed.  So if is starts storming again, we will have a nice shower in the middle of the night.

I am usually a pretty laid back traveler.  My expectations for places really aren’t that high.  As long as the place is clean and there are no signs of bedbugs I’m usually okay. But after a few rough nights of sleep, I can be a little bit of a princess.  I do realize that tomorrow or sometime next week, I’ll probably laugh at this situation and realize how it plays into the adventure of traveling.  But not tonight.

Needless to say, tonight I am quite homesick.  We have been gone for well over a month and tonight is the first night that I would do just about anything to be back in Ithaca.  The good news is that tomorrow we should be arriving back at “home” in Koszalin.  The even better news is I have a bag of Dunkin Donuts coffee and Wegmans coffee waiting for me there.  No more Nescafe instant coffee for the rest of the summer!

The positives of tonight are that I have a place to sleep and a plane ticket versus a train ticket. The moral of the story is  “you can’t always get what you want; but if you try sometimes you might well find; you get what you need”.