It’s amazing how much sightseeing you can do if you cover 6-8 miles before the throng of tourists gets out.  You see, I’m accompanied by the exercise Nazi who is awake at the crack of dawn, running shoes on, and not taking no for an answer.  So now instead of walking tours, I’m subjected to a running tour of the city centers and ancillary streets, while other sane people on vacation are sleeping, or at worst sitting half asleep in a picturesque coffee shop.

I’ve run the streets of Vienna, Budapest, Prague, and an assortment of other smaller towns.  And if Yano had her way, we would’ve done a couple laps around the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp, as would be fitting her non-negotiable running nature.  Luckily, the Polish were not as amused at a whip wielding wife forcing her husband to run at slightly above anaerobic pace.

In other news, we are in Krakow, Poland, having done a tour of the Auschwitz camps.  I am not much of a tour or museum person (with the exception of the Louvre, the Uffizi, and the Cairo Museum), but the visit to Auschwitz will take your breath away.  If there is anything that made this entire trip worth it, it was those 2 hours and 45 minutes.  Words cannot do justice to it.  Suffice to say, that it was the first time I saw a groups of hundreds of people speechless for an entire afternoon.