I woke up to the sound of the church over the river bonging 4am, one minute before my alarm, to a text that my flight was departing 19:30. The app didn’t say anything and I had no email, so I got up and got dressed – even if everything updates two hours before departure, I can’t afford to take the risk that the text is the one that’s wrong.

Nonetheless, I could have had another half an hour in bed – whatever Google Maps said about the bus during the chaos yesterday, the first one doesn’t depart until 4:56am, so I walked down to the next bus stop just to have something to do other than stand at a bus stop in the dark for 40 mins.

Got to the airport in plenty of time, with all evidence pointing to a morning departure after all. App still saying 7.30am, no email, morning flight listed on both Krakow and Bournemouth airport websites, flight appearing on departure boards. So I sat at the gate. It is now 7:22 and the bad-tempered man opposite clearly thinks we’re not getting away in the next 8 minutes. On the bright side, his commentary is saving me the effort of turning round to check what’s going on.

Well, here’s fun. The flight has vanished from the sign over the gate and my boarding pass has vanished from the app (I have a screenshot!). No email, no update, no idea right now.

Departures board is now showing neither gate nor explanation. The button that was boarding pass on the app became check in and is now help. We wait.

07:51 Person in queue with no more idea or authority than any of the rest of us says “‘probably’ a delay of another couple of hours”. The angry man can’t comprehend that Ryanair, known for its exemplary service, is not being helpful.

08:05 Departure board now says delayed until 19:20, just like the text said. We see no way out because we’re beyond both security and passport control. Looks like a long day sitting at gates 12-18 with one kiosk and one restaurant to sustain us.

08:22 They are slowly and painfully stamping us out of the non-Schengen zone. Do I leave the airport altogether and trust the 19:20 on the board, bearing in mind I have no official notification?

08:33: Delayed until 19:20 has now vanished from the board. We can leave but we no longer trust when it’ll be safe to come back. We no longer trust that there will even be a flight today.

08:42 Really short on options other than trusting this flight will happen. Looking at flights and trains to and from other places and feeling trapped right now.

09:42 Still no plan but I’m out of the airport and heading for Krakow main station.

09:46 easyJet from Prague to Gatwick is looking like the one, as long as I can get a reservation from Krakow Central.

10:22 I am coming back to Bournemouth tonight via Wrocław. I’m on a train which will get in mid-afternoon, then it’s 39 minutes on the bus to the airport and then hopefully home at 8.30.

16:53 I am at Wrocław. I had some chips at the station and took an hour to run up to Stary Rynek and the church with incredible stained glass and now I’m at the airport, through security, wondering if Philip Glenister really does voice the gate announcements here and keeping my fingers crossed that a plane actually comes to the gate on the board this time. Bournemouth is expecting the Krakow plane at 21:00, half an hour later than the Wrocław one but I still can’t see it listed on the Krakow website. I am tired, sweaty, ready to yell at the next person walking around this airport with their eyes closed and wondering about several life choices made recently – mostly weekends in Paris and Ryanair to Romania next month.

18:38 Boarding starts at 18:55 but two-thirds of the Bournemouth-bound passengers are queuing already. Trying not to be mildly concerned that I can’t see a Ryanair plane from here. No indication that anything is awry though.

18:43 There’s a Ryanair plane from Bristol arriving three hours late at 7.06 according to Flight Radar 24. Is that our plane? Or is it going back to Dublin at 11pm after a really long wait?

18:47 It is our plane! Sit down, we’re going to be a bit delayed, our plane isn’t even here yet!

18:52 Nonetheless, passports are being scanned and people are being sent… somewhere.

19:06 Looks like we’re going for the fastest turnaround ever.

Today started a bit lazily after yesterday’s fairly early morning. I had my bread already so I had breakfast and then I walked across the river to see the dragon in daylight. Next stop, the old town square and since it was damp and I was lazy and had a 48-hour transport pass which I wasn’t getting the most use out of, I took the tram all of two stops. The square is interesting but the rain was getting heavier by the moment. I explored the kiosks in the Cloth Hall and watched some miserable wet pigeons but then I decided the best thing to do in the rain is a boat trip. Tram back to near the river, walk down to the river itself, get a ticket, get told boat goes “around 12pm” and offered to sit in the covered restaurant to wait. Boat arrives nearer 12.30 but that’s fine, it’s raining and I’m carrying all my luggage.

It was a good boat trip. Our boat felt more like a lounge, with white leather seats on both sides facing in but there were also more seats at the back, next to an open window that folds outwards to create its own umbrella. Perfect! The only issue is that the only thing that’s really interesting to see from the boat is Vavek Hill, which you can see from the riverbank. Still, it got me out the rain for another hour.

By the time I got back to dry land, the weather was improving, so I went back to the old town square for a slightly better look and then I decided to go to the Owl Cave. I’d seen it on Google Maps but reviews about whether you could go in were inconclusive. The man standing in the entrance with an owl seemed to confirm it both existed and was open so in I went. It only opened 5 weeks ago and he’s still figuring things out but in short, we got a presentation on falconry and birds of prey and I got to hold 5 birds – an African Spotted Eagle Ow who doesn’t like painted nails, the cutest cat-like European barn owl (more orange than the British variety), who just wanted to hop around on the table and attack gloves and feathers, an undersized runt of a male kestrel, a grumpy Harris Hawk and a peregrine falcon. It’s an odd thing to do in central Krakow but it gets you out of the rain and where else do you get to hold large hunting birds?

Then I went to the airport. Lots of things not right here. A lot of coaches parked right outside. A lot of people inside. A departure board showing flights up to 4:45 and no later, when it was 4:35, with a lot of flights cancelled, delayed or diverted to Katowice. My flight was still showing on the website as “check in at desks 22-29” but I was wary of going through security, certain I was going to get turned back, especially when they announced that all the 20-something desks were closed for operational reasons. Well, that’s fine, I’m already checked in, I’m with Ryanair, but something clearly wasn’t right. No email. Desks missing from the website! On a whim, I checked Bournemouth Airport’s arrivals for the night – my flight was marked cancelled! I went back to my emails. Delayed from 7.20pm on Sunday to 7.30am on Monday! Still no idea what was happening but it turns out Twitter knows everything. A plane from Turkey had overshot the runway earlier in the afternoon and while there were no injuries, it had messed things up. The airport had been closed for a couple of hours but now they were deciding to close the airport for the rest of the evening.

So I rebooked my boat, having checked how early the airport bus ran in the morning, and got the bus back to Krakow. I dropped my luggage, which I’d been carrying around all day, back on the boat (the reception laughed when I checked back in) and went back to the old square, since the rain had stopped. I was heading for the underground McDonalds – perhap not the proper appreciation of Polish cuisine but it has a proper old-fashioned cave-like downstairs!

When I came back out, there were three fire engines and two police cars parked outside St Mary’s. The fire engines had been there when I passed by earlier. There was no sign of fire or emergency and one of the fireman had been taking photos of the fire engine with the square in the background so I hadn’t worried. But now there were two police cars too and it had been at least half an hour and yet there was still no sign of anything happening. Well, I went back to the boat and it began to rain on the way. I had some snacks so I ate some crisps and drank some blackcurrant juice and then I went on Facebook and remembered it was Rosa Patrol’s Rebel Cup Zoom meeting, where there would be points on offer for number of attendees and number of countries they were in. Well, there probably wouldn’t be anyone else in Poland. I failed at the scavenger hunt, not having random Rebel items with me in my personal item but at least I gave them an extra country.

I went to bed after that. However, a little after midnight, to judge by the church bonging on the other side of the river, my next door neighbours came in and they yelled and had showers on the other side of the paper-thin wall – not appreciated by someone with an alarm set for 4am…

I set my alarm for 7.30am which is pretty early for someone who didn’t get to her boat until gone 10pm but I needed to run over to the Carrefour for bread for breakfast and then, having eaten it, I needed to walk 11 minutes down the road to get the bus to the salt mines. I had a ticket for the Tourist Tour at 10am, having heard that it’s one of those places you should get to early.

Well, the mine is pretty incredible. We were led through three levels over an hour and a half but there are actually a lot more levels and we only got to about half its total depth. We saw passages and chambers and salt lakes, bits of old machinery, public licking spots, salt sculptures, all sorts. We had a couple of stops on the way down – there’s a chamber with a shop and cafe two-thirds of the way through where we lost “the mother”, who turned out to be “Irene’s mother” who’d wandered on with the English-speaking group in front of us. At the end, we were left in a big red-lit chamber to find out own way out, which meant that we could shop or go to the underground restaurant or to the museum or just queue for the elevator. I assumed the elevator was near the queue but we had probably at least another kilometre of striding through more passageways, getting mixed up with groups going in at least two other directions until we reached the lift – not the one our tour guide had pointed at on the way down, either. Despite them counting us through the gate, there were 8 too many to fit in the elevator so the guide who’d brought us had to wait. At the top was a shop but after I’d dithered over what to buy, if anything, the card system went down. Turned out it went down all over the complex, so I had to get some cash out right back at the beginning of the tour to buy some salt and an ice cream and I bet that ATM went dry pretty quickly, since it’s right next to the ticket desks and their card machines weren’t working either.

I’d arrived at the mining town not long after 9am and it was 2.30pm by the time I got back to Krakow, so I headed straight for Wawel Castle, which is almost right opposite my boat. It’s a natural limestone hill which has had fortifications on it for hundreds of years. You can just wander around and look at everything but you can also book tours. I went for the Between the Walls tour, which was pretty short but at least got me out of the sun, which took me below ground into the medieval bit of the walls and into the gap between the inner and outer defensive walls, which featured “how defensive walls work”, “how Wawel Hill came to be”, “how the dinosaur died out” and “the dragon under the castle”. By the time I emerged into the sun again, it was a little less sunny and a bit more cloudy and I was running out of energy. I made my way back down the other side of the hill, crossed the river and finally ate the lunch I’d been carrying around all day. Then I lay on my bunk for a while as the rain hammered down outside and when it was finished, I ran across the road to the Carrefour for some chocolate and some juice for breakfast and decided, since it was dry and pretty warm, I’d walk down the river to look at Wawel Hill in the dark and then cross the river and walk along the other side and look for the dragon (which does not photograph well in the dark). So that’s what I did.

Tomorrow’s job is to get that dragon in daylight and to get up to the Old Square. I have more time than I thought before I have to get back to the airport so I don’t have to get up too early and I already have the bread for tomorrow’s breakfast so I can have a slightly lazier morning than I had today.

Day one: I arrived at Bournemouth Airport just before the two hours before the flight, which you absolutely do not need at Bournemouth. I got through security in three minutes flat and then went to the restaurant/bar/thing and had some cheesy garlic bread – just the thing before being confined in an airless space with 300 strangers!

I had some snacks from Smiths and read my book and then it was time to board – well, it was time to queue at the gate and then queue again outside. Meanwhile, the 17:25 Murcia flight (delayed to 17:25; yes, that is correct), which was ten minutes later than ours, was already literally boarding. Of course, being in seat A, the person in seat C was already there but he seemed very nice and jolly and told me that the middle seat would remain vacant because it was his partner’s seat and she was too unwell to travel. I decided not to probe further there but just enjoy the elbow room, because Ryanair certainly don’t give you knee room.

We set off with the sun blinding me and by the time we arrived, it was total darkness. We were put on a bus to go to the terminal, although the people waiting to get on our plane to go back had just walked from the door. Then, because we’ve “taken back control!”, we had to queue for ages round and round in a snake for all other passports, while person after person returned sheepishly from the EU auto gates. Minor issue: as we rounded the first wiggle, a security person in a yellow “ask me for help” jacket spied a backpack abandoned on the floor as we came in and spent ten minutes going round the queue shouting “has anyone lost a bag??” in increasingly desperate tones as we all began to imagine how an evacuation worked while we were all stuck behind immigration. Back outside onto the apron? Push us through without stamping our passports and let that be a problem for another day? And at last a girl who looked exactly like you’d expect her to look, having the bag shoved into her hands by one of her travelling companions, claimed it, with lots of “oh, thank you so much, I really appreciate it, oh, I’m useless, me” while the rest of us tutted and muttered together about the security near-miss and how many times the lady in the yellow jacket had pretty much stood next to her and shouted about the lost bag.

Easy through the other side. I followed the signs for buses, followed the bus stops, found the sign that told me city buses went from stop 1 and bus 300 confirmed that for me as it passed me as I walked to stop 1. It waited there long enough for me to figure out how to buy a 48-hour 3-zone bus ticket, to get on the bus, to validate the ticket (that’s the step where people get caught out) and re-validate it because I’d stuck it in the machine the wrong way round, find a seat, take a selfie and generally get settled before we started moving. Then I followed the route until we were nearly where I wanted to be and I moved forward as we approached so I could read the information board at the front. Got off in the right place, right next to the smallest Carrefour I’ve ever seen, so I got some breakfast and then walked down to the river to my boat.

In high season, it’s a hostel with bunk beds in dorms but out of high season, I get a room with four bunks to myself. I thought that but I was shown to “my room” which had towels and sheets on only one bed so I’m pretty confident this is definitely my room. The bed is not as uncomfortable as some reviews said but it’s very hot in here so I’ve got the air conditioning on for a while. It’s far too noisy to use all night but if I can get the room to a tolerable temperature, maybe I’ll survive the night. I had a quick stroll down to the funfair just a bit down the river but as it was getting on for 10.30 and I’ve got to be up early in the morning, a ride on the Krakow Eye will just have to wait. I don’t mind the room so far and the location is certainly pretty spectacular.