Today was about driving and getting to western Poland to continue our travels. It was a pretty quiet drive, but we quickly missed our quiet roads in the Baltic States. Poland has some of the densest truck traffic we have seen in Europe, I think more dense than even Germany. We don’t know where they are all going , but there are a lot of them.
We are the only customers at a small family owned campground tonight. We have met the whole family. The husband has a great collection of communist era vehicles that he spent about 2 hours showing me. The wife very proudly showed us a video of their sons preschool getting an English lesson today, he is 18 months old!
He had two copies of a van I had never heard of called the ILSA. It was produced in Poland from 1952 to 1994. He told me the original engine and transmission was based on Ford trucks that the US had given the Soviet Union as Lend Lease in WWII.
He bought this one from the Krakow transit authority in 2015 where it had been used as a night bus. The production of the van continued for nearly seven years after the fall of communism. It has a feature I have never seen in any vehicle. The top of the engine is accessible from the interior of the vehicle. You remove a cover in the center of the dash and the engine is right there. He joked that it was so the guy in the passenger seat could work on the engine while they were driving!
These are the kind of encounters that make these trips so much fun. The family was so welcoming and we spent two hours looking at cars communicating mainly thru Google translate, and it was fabulous.
