Michigan summer is over, but if you like the sun and beautiful vistas (and have time to do so), you might choose this time of the year to travel to the American Southwest, to experience the exceptional beauty of the world-famous national parks in Utah and Arizona. Traveling there in October – for example – will give you the benefit of milder temperatures during the day (70s F) and of less people, while in the summer the parks tend to be hot and very crowded, which could make even finding a place to park problematic.
Among the visitors to the parks are numerous travelers from Europe and Asia, including – of course – Poles. You can count on chance encounters with them on the trails, during which – once you reveal your Polish origins (or your Polish accent!) – you might even stir up some excitement and hear interesting stories!
This was the case with a group of three Polish American sisters, Barbara, Debbie and Jennifer, who grew up in Pennsylvania, and whom we recently met in the Canyonlands National Park, Utah. Their Polish ancestors came to the US in the late 1800s from Jabłonka near Zakopane. Like many Polish Americans, the three sisters helped a lot their relatives in Poland during the hard times of the early 1990s by sending packages and even putting a distant cousin through college. On the trail, they loved to talk about their experiences in Poland, especially about a three-day-long wedding they attended and the fun they had there.
While hiking in the fairy-tale-like Bryce Canyon National Park, also in Utah, we met Marnix, a Belgian man in his late 60s. Marnix, who in Poland is called “Jacek”, was born of a Polish mother, Aleksandra Sidorski, who during WWII at the age of 14 was forcibly taken to Germany as a laborer. Before the war her family lived in the Wrocław area, and she was one of nine sisters. After the war was over, only one sister still lived in Poland, while others, in attempting to escape the war, ended up in Ukraine or Belarus, and stayed there. At the German farm where she was forced to work, Marnix’s mother met a Belgian girl, a little older than herself, and followed her to Belgium, where she met Marnix’s father. At first, Marnix, who loves photography, claimed that he knew only very a few words in Polish, but after some coaxing, it was revealed that he knew many more than he was first ready to admit.
Near the entrance to Arches National Park, Utah, we met very friendly Poles from Kęty near Oświęcim, who seemed to have a very similar itinerary to ours, as we saw them in a couple more national parks as well. They exemplify the ever-growing number of Polish tourists, usually well-travelled around Europe, who can effort to make America their next travel destination. The fact that so many Poles can afford such excursions – in the Sequoia Park, California, we saw a busload of Polish tourists – speaks also to the increasing prosperity of Poles.
While we visited these spectacular places, not only Polish people reminded us of “Polishness”. Our eye also caught a sign for “Navajo Polish Dogs” (hotdogs, that is…) which were sold in a café in Monument Valley and a big white dog (!), not “owczarek podhalański” but certainly his look-a-like, a Great Pyrenees visiting Grand Canyon National Park. Not really Polish, but almost…;-)
Text and photos: Alina Klin
I visited the American “Wild West” with my husband and a couple of friends from Poland in late September and early October of this year.
