Krkonoše National Park: Exploring Polish mountains with family

After our trip to the East Coast of Canada, I flew to Europe with the girls while Christian returned home. After spending a grueling 35 hours in transit, we arrived in Harrachov in the Czeck Rebuplic. Here we spent a week playing, relaxing, and joining lots of different fun activities with my mom, her partner and all of their children and grandchildren. After our family holiday I had convinced my sister and her partner to come hiking with us in Krkonose National Park. I had not made a particular plan; but some last minute messaging with a friend at home with polish connections settled out the plan. A friend of our friend even booked our accommodation. 
After waving goodbye to the rest of the family we drove to Karpacz on the Polish side of the border. We had some trouble locating diapers last minute, but we did succeed before taking the gondola up to the alpine. It was busy - very busy - like Joffre Lakes can not even compare busy. We headed off towards Dom Śląski, where we were planning on hiking back across the Czech border, but the trail was closed for maintenance, so we had to back track a bit along the Polish-Czech friendship trail before we crossed the border and hiked the last little bit to our hotel, Luční bouda, for the night. On this trip I was carrying N, and my sister and her partner were carrying all our stuff, which luckily wasn't too much as we didn't need to carry dinner, breakfast or a tent.

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Hiking away from Luční bouda

The hotel was not cheap, but luckily for us they had a sleeping bag room, where you could sleep on the floor with up to 19 other people for a reasonable price. After dinner in the restaurant we went outside to let the kids play by the little river running past. In the morning it was foggy and rainy outside, so we took advantage of the breakfast buffet right up until it closed. I ate so much that lunch was basically unnecessary. After packing up the fog had cleared and the rain stopped. The trails were a lot less crowded this morning, either due to the weather or the fact that it was no longer the weekend. We headed back across the border and turned west along the friendship trail. The trail had nice views of lakes below and the destination for the night, the Strzecha Akademicka Hotel. F kept a good speed powered by Disney stories retold by Moster Laerke. At the Słonecznik rock formation we had a quick snack break, but it was rather cold and windy, so we decided to push on to the next rock formation, Pielgrzymy - Skaly, before having our big break. It turned out to be a great decision. The rock formations were very cool and we spend a long time exploring them, climbing to the tops and hiding in little caves. The rest of the hike was a bit tough for F. It required a lot of bribery in the form of candy, but we made it to Strzecha Akademicka luckily right before the rain returned. This hotel was definitely less fancy, but also a much more reasonable cost, so we had our own room. We had a celebratory ice cream, a shower and dinner before heading to bed early. The next day we got up early, and hiked the few kilometers back to the gondola. At the bottom we had a quick lunch before we started the long drive back towards Denmark to visit the rest of my family.