Zakopane

We went digital.

But I remember like being up in outside Krakow in a place called Zakopane skiing.

And like I was trying to promote my own magazine.

So I was skiing down a slope, a baby slope, let me tell you, with the magazine in hand, you

You're absolutely right.

That's why actually in Saigon and here too in Zakopane, I just said that I just want to be retired from the stages, but I want to put our new top leaders, in the oldest case, your community to the stage.

That'd be nice, yeah.

because they are new faces and at the same time, when they are on stage, I feel like I am on stage as well.

So, Bishop Wall, How are you feeling after our vacation in Poland? So if you watched last week's episode, we had Archbishop Coakley and Bishop Conley on.

The four of us with Bishop Wall and I were hiking in Zakopane, Poland.

We're a couple of days back home and getting through jet lag.

So how are you feeling?

We went to 25 countries.

It was about halfway into our travels that we found ourselves in a little town called Zakopane in Poland, which is in the Polish Alps.

We were looking for an indoor activity to do because it was a rainy day and a beer spa popped up on TripAdvisor.

Naturally, Slavok and those things, beers and spas, what could be a better combination? So very quickly, we found ourselves soaking in a tub filled with hops and malt.

Okay.

Yeah, so I am, like, holding on to my journal with, [laughs] like, you know, dear life, being like, "Okay, I just need to carve out a space to open this up, page through it day by day, look at the reflection questions, the notes, the prayers," and, um, I'm like, "I just want a scenic place," and we're on this beautiful town, Zakopane.

There's this river running through it literally, and so I'm like, "I just gotta get to town, kinda outside of it, and I just wanna find, like, a riverbank to sit, [laughs] to sit on." And so I, I find my spot, and it's this, this steep place where I could sit, and then it kinda, like, rolls down right into the river.

It's gorgeous.

And this is a true story.

Right.

And so here in Zakopane, this is, like, close to where Brother Albert, after he had his conversion fully into his religious life, he had a hermitage.

Mm-hmm.

But I wondered if we could start with how you became the guy who skis the highest peaks in the world without oxygen.

You live in Zakopane, which I have been lucky enough to visit.

I went about 10, 20 years ago in refuges and fuelled by bigos and vodka.

Yeah.

Such an important part of eventually being able to ski professionally was my older brother.

It was thanks to him that I got to know the mountains.

He was working on slope safety in Zakopane.

He gave me a chance to do it on a professional level, and I also worked on the ski patrol.

So I started doing my research.

And I basically made this plan to go from the very north of Poland in Gdansk all the way down to the south, and then even more south from Krakow into Zakopane.

And the whole trip would fly in and out of Stockholm, Sweden, which if you want a life hack if you want to get to Europe okay first of all layovers in Iceland are the way to go and Iceland air has great flights but also stopping in Stockholm or like having your trip your round trip ticket be to Stockholm is so cheap from from America For some reason, it was like 400 something dollars to go from Seattle to Stockholm round trip.

And then I got like a $50 flight from Stockholm to Gdansk, Poland.