The Winter Capital of Poland Zakopane

Zakopane, in southern Poland, is near the border with Slovakia. It is built in a valley between the foothills of the Tatra Mountains and Mount Gubalowka.   It is a quaint town with an alpine character.   The architecture of this region is quite unique.  Houses are all constructed from wood without the use of metal nails and traditionally, every building has its own name.

We arrived in Zakopane on a Friday in middle March on a train from Krakow and settled in at Tatra Chalet on a quiet street about 30 minutes (walking) and a $6 taxi ride from the main part of town.

The chalet was a comfortable inn with a breakfast buffet included in the price of the room.  Our room was a large two room suite with a cozy on your feet heated bathroom floor and a king size bed. After sleeping on a queen size bed for three weeks I thought I’d relish in the king size bed but it turns out I haven’t missed our king size bed.  Hmm…am I ready to down size our house and bed at home?

The main commercial street of the city, Krupówki, offers a great variety of trendy shops and even has North Face and H&M store.  Intermingled with the trendy shops are open air rustic “fast” food stalls and wagons selling local specialties.

We particularly enjoyed sitting in sheepskin covered lounge chairs sipping hot wine, soaking up the sunshine (on Sunday), and people watching.
Couples pushing prams and strollers were everywhere.  I can’t even remember when I last saw a pram in the states.

Zakopane is a recreational area, but I can count on one hand the number of men we saw with protuding beer bellies (and this includes Krakow.)  Considering the amount of beer being drunk everywhere, this is phenomenal.

We didn’t see many stylish ski outfits and felt very at home in the family orientated winter destination.

We took what we thought was going to be a sledge ride to a lake in the mountains with a hut serving hot drinks, but we left it up to the hotel to tell the taxi where to go and we took a trip to a “stopping” area where we got out and walked, but there wasn’t a lake and there wasn’t a hut–total one hour and about $115.00.

It turned out we were at Dolina Koscieliska and we wanted to be at Morskie Oko. At first it seemed pricey, but we owned horses and they are expensive thousand pound animals to room and board.  There weren’t many takers for the sledge ride and we soon found out why.

Our horse was Bessie a three year old mare.  Poor Bessie had to sludge through wet snow with the sledge hitting dirt or pavement often.  This made for a bumpy hang-on-to your hat ride.  Not quite the gliding through fresh snow we were hoping for and that we would have experienced the following weekend since a late winter storm arrived in the area.

To keep the trails free of copious amounts of horse poop our driver used a “poop catcher.”  Nifty invention and no need to stop and scoop it up!

Not to be missed is the Kasprowy Wierch Cable Car ride to the top of the mountains, but that is exactly what we did–miss it.

Saturday we woke we cloudy weather and the hotel said we wouldn’t see anything if we went to the top of the mountain.  They directed us to live web cams to prove their point.

 https://www.onthesnow.com/lesser-poland/zakopane-kasprowy-wierch/webcams.html

Sunday we woke to beautiful sunny weather–perfect for viewing snowy mountain peaks.  We knew we had to buy tickets online to avoid the queues so we lingered over breakfast and then logged on to buy tickets.  No tickets before our bus left!  Then to make matters worse we ended up with no time to take the shorter cable ride that leaves from the center of town.

Tips:    From Krakow to Zakopane take the train–it is comfortable, takes three hours and is scenic. Take it both ways if you can. The weekend we went the train ride back to Krakow was going to take six hours with a train change at one point so we took the bus.  The bus is supposed to take two hours, but there was construction and heavy traffic and it took three hours.  The weekend before a friend said it took four hours.

Buy cable car tickets NOW–don’t linger over breakfast.

The mountains clustered together like they were cold, and under all that snow I don’t doubt they were. I imagined them to shiver under their white coats, the real cause of the avalanches perhaps. Perhaps in that rock they think in the way timeless creatures must, with no regard for time, no concept of what it must be to hurry, be anxious or sad. I’d like to think that deep in the tonnes of granite is a spirit of the earth, slumbering since the time of the dinosaurs or before.  Angela Abraham January 6, 2015

You can’t visit Zakopane without viewing staggeringly beautiful mountain summits crowned with snow covered headdresses and inhaling the crisp cold air because as you know…

Atmosphere is everything.