Travel fail, then onward to Prague

Travel fail: So I got to the bus terminal at 6am for a 6:30 departure and I couldn't find my bus... anywhere... It wasn't on the departures board, there was no physical bay allocated to that bus, and there was definitely no bus from that company in the station. I looked and looked and looked, and I watched 6:30 come and then pass. Still no bus... There was a help desk but it doesn't open till 9 on weekends so it was no help at all.

The terminal supposedly has free wifi, but it wouldn't work for me. I was briefly able to connect to the internet of a bus that had just pulled in and came across some reviews of the bus company and this doesn't appear to be uncommon for them... the terms 'bunch of cowboys' and 'scam artists' came up amongst others. Then that bus departed and I lost my internet again. So I was sitting at Krakow bus terminal at 7am on a Saturday with a useless ticket, no internet, no assistance, not speaking the local language, and having already missed the train I was supposed to connect to later in Bohumin because I only had a 40 minuter transit time, and I was already almost an hour late.

Bugger...

There are ticket machines at the terminal, but one was broken and the translation feature on the other one wasn't working, and Polish isn't my strongest language!

So in a really long and frustrating process of 'borrowing' the wifi of other buses as they came in (and each only stayed in the park long enough to unload their passengers and luggage and pick up the next lot before leaving), I managed to find another bus company that was running Krakow to Prague later that day and had seats available. Then I had to wait for a really full bus to come in so they would take a long time to unload and I could do the credit card transaction uninterrupted. But after a really long day and 8 hours on a bus I made it to Prague that night! There were many times during the morning that I didn't think that that was going to happen!

It was persisting down with rain when I arrived in Prague, and I had to take the metro and then a tram and then a 5 minute walk to get to the hotel, but I really didn't care. I had made it there against all odds, and I have been really lucky with the weather so far so I can't complain.

I only took a couple of photos that night because I was juggling a camera and a suitcase and an umbrella.

I was just so glad to get there that I had a packet of chips from the minibar for tea and went to bed!