Below are photos from three and a half days in Poland. In another post, I’ll add impressions from visiting Aushchwitz, walking around Krakow, and talking to our hosts about history and climate change. It is a lot to process.
Click next to see more.
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Our second and third nights in Poland we stayed with Maciek and Magda, a young couple active in Krakow's bike touring community. Here they are saying “Welcome to Poland” in Polish:
From SFO to Krakow’s John Paul II Airport, according to my GPS (which I left on the entire flight), we logged almost 6,000 miles of flying.
I uploaded this flight to Strava (a website for sharing bike rides recorded by GPS), but for some reason, Strava didn’t think we had biked the distance, and didn’t process it (Strava wouldn’t believe we were biking at 500 miles an hour).
We were met at the airport by Iwo, who we met via the warm showers website, at eleven thirty at night. He led us, by bike, about four kilometers to his house.
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Tarrapass estimates that by flying, we emitted, combined, about 5,000 pounds of carbon dioxide. By biking from the airport instead of driving, I estimated that we saved about one to two pounds. (Here’s the blog entry on buying offsets.)
Here's what we're taking on our bike trip form Krakow to Croatia. Did we forget anything?
Not pictured: our four panniers (two rear for each bike), some of Lindsey's clothes, my biking sandals, my flip flops, my helmet. I've found that the key to traveling light is using a super small sleeping bag, sleeping pad, stove, and tent. Both our sleeping bags fit in the red stuff sack behind Lindsey’s helmet. We're using a Tarptent, the lightest Thermarests, and a home made alcohol stove. We're also betting that it will be hot in Eastern Europe, and that we won't regret not bringing any warm clothes…
According to Terrapass, Lindsey and I will each be responsible for almost 5,500 pounds of carbon dioxide by flying from San Francisco to Europe and back. 5,500 pounds, or about 2.5 metric tons, is half as much carbon as the average Serbian or Croatian produces in an entire year.
Moreover, as summarized on Oroeco, the contrails of jets, because of the radiative property of clouds, may double the global warming effects of flying. In other words, we aren't saving the earth with this vacation.
I'd also like to point out that flying is absolutely amazing. In just a few hours, we will board a flying machine that will take us halfway around the world in less than a day of travel. Compared to past centuries of civilization, we would appear like gods. The comedian Louis CK does a good job of summing up how amazing this is (and how we've become unaware of how awesome it is) in this video.
Flight has brought humanity enormous good, and it has allowed the world be connected in a way that would otherwise be impossible. I wonder if people would care as much about global problems if they weren't able to fly and see the globe.
The solution isn't to stop flying (although better telecommuting can avoid the need for some flights). The solution is for us to figure out how to fly without polluting. That will likely be really hard–batteries are too heavy for flight, and biofuels require large amounts of land and water. Nonetheless, we figured out how to fly. I'm sure that if we put effort in (investment, lots of it) we can figure this out.
I wish I could spend a bit extra on my flight to invest in the development of non-polluting flight technology. But the airlines don't offer that, so I will do the next best thing and buy carbon offsets. Obviously, offsets are imperfect, but at least we're doing something about our pollution.
So, for two people flying to Europe, we bought offsets for 11,000 pounds of carbon dioxide, which cost us $65 on Terrapass. Yes, that is a lot of money, but it is small compared to the price (gulp) of the ticket, and it is one tenth of what the airlines are charging us to ship two bikes to Europe and back ($150 per bike per leg!).
At least we're taking public transit to the airport. I only hope that BART lets us take the bikes on at rush hour…
We’re almost ready to leave for Poland and start our ride from Krakow to Dubrovnik. Below are two of our training rides from the past weekend, as recorded by Strava.
On my last trip, at the end of every day I’d write down the odometer’s reading. Once every few days, at an Internet cafe, I’d enter those miles. Using what was usually an XP Windows computer, I’d also open Paint, draw a line on a map, and then upload the updated image. How tedious!
That was 2006. It is now 2012, and satellites and social networks have freed us from those dark days. I’m brining my Garmin 500 GPS, which I’ll sync with Strava. Of course, I now have to bring an extra battery and solar charger to power the device. but all the mapping will be done automatically online once we connect the GPS to a computer (which we’ll do every few days).
Here are our two training rides from the weekend (which we did with our panniers to get ready):
Here we are on Old La Honda, with all of our gear.
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