Baltic Sea Circle Day 14
It had continued to rain during the night but by morning it had cleared up. We intended to make today a long driving day, since we hadn’t got as far as we anticipated yesterday. Our Airbnb was in Kołobrzeg and we planned to have a stopover in Gdańsk. The task for today was also to find a shop that would print our photos of all the challenges that we had done and glue them into our roadbook ready for judging at the finish line.
We got up early, tried to get as much rainwater off the tent as possible, and then packed it up. A German couple who were campervanning on the site came over for a chat, they had seen a lot of our rally companions in the town of Marijampole the previous day as they had organised an event with the town mayor to arrange their cars in a giant peace sign. We were telling them about our journey and adventures and the gentleman was asking about the car, his friend had a 924 and he had a VW Phaeton so he told me all about that. We said we were heading to Poland next and the lady warned us about the potholes they’d seen. I was dreading it! We brushed our teeth after the lady warned the man not to tell such long stories, and hit the road, forgetting that we needed to trade items and we’d missed a perfect opportunity.
We soon crossed the border into Poland, where we joined an amazing new bit of road. What was the campsite lady on about?! The road lasted about 15 km and the rest seemed to be under construction, so we joined the road towards Gdańsk which was single carriageway and wound through Polish villages, forest and hilly farmland. We also remembered to move our watches back one hour, gaining valuable time to get across Poland. It was Sunday morning, and as we travelled through each village we saw the local communities on their way to churches, dressed smartly. The roads were not as bad at I had imagined and we were able to make our way across the Polish countryside, with a new village every few kilometres, the speed dropping to 50 kmph and then speeding up to 90 for about 1 km before reaching the next town.
We turned off the main road, right behind a group of cyclists wearing numbers, clearly a local event going on today, where the road became a patchwork of asphalt similar to our Latvian adventures. The juddering of the Porsche’s firm and aged suspension was loud as it took another punishment. Cyclists now littered the road every few hundred meters as well, another obstacle to keep an eye on. The road entered a dense forest area and we took a break at a rest stop. We considered swapping driving duties, but Gemma was quite nervous of the hilly and windy roads with the extra cyclists, so after a drink and snack we set off again, this time me giving audio descriptions of my driving observations and decisions so that Gemma could see when and why I changed gear and applied the gas and brakes in the old Porsche.
Gemma took over once we got to some straighter faster roads and did a good hour and a half towards Gdańsk, while I took a rest and kept up the co-driver duties of checking the map, providing snacks and drink for the driver and keeping an eye out for speed limit signs and other obstacles. As we approached the city we swapped again; identified a car park near the city centre and plotted a course. As on old city Gdańsk has cobbled streets in places and we took these as slow as we dared in the busy moving traffic, and kept an eye out for trams, cyclists and e-scooters. We’d hit midday and the temperature had got to 27C or thereabouts, but it felt hotter in the Porsche, and probably was! We parked up in a cobbled car park, which had impossibly narrow lanes between the spaces. I hopped out and paid at the parking machine, a challenge in itself to figure out the time and which buttons to press. Eventually a ticket was printed and we could explore the city. It was very busy, and it turned out was the Polish holidays. The avenue we walked down was lined with restaurants, with balloon sellers, buskers, girls selling coloured hair braids and the omnipotent “living statue”. We had done some research beforehand on where we could get photos printed, and our Polish translation of “instant photo printing” was failing us; plus it was a Polish holiday, and a Sunday, all the shops were closed. We gave up on the idea and stopped to eat some lunch, we found a nice Asian place and ordered some noodle salad and a mango curry, which we ate outside in the sun while tourists and locals bustled around us.
Once full we paid the bill and made our way back to the car for the next leg of the journey. After a short stint on some dual carriageway out of the city we got onto more country roads, these ones a lot more busy than the morning ones with more impatient drivers. Everyone was keen to overtake despite us doing the speed limits. We eventually figured out how the Poles like to overtake, and let others overtake them, after getting a rude gesture from one driver. After that it was relative plain sailing as we put the miles behind us, stopping only to refuel the car and give our Airbnb host a call to say we were an hour away.
At last, after a long and hot drive we arrived in Kołobrzeg and found the apartment complex where we were staying. The lady hosting us was there and greeted us, and apologised for not being able to speak good English, but through Google Translate we managed to communicate and she showed us what the keys were for and where everything was, and we arranged how to give the keys back. We settled in to the brand new apartment filled with IKEA furniture and brought up some food from the car to cook, some veggie chilli tonight! Gemma also rinsed out our wet clothes from Lithuania and hung them out to dry on the terrace outside as I was convinced it wasn’t going to rain that night. After an 11.5 hour day of driving we were exhausted and grateful for a real bed to sleep in. Tomorrow would be the dash for the finish line, and we’d need to get our photos printed too. We found a place in Rostock that should be open and do instant printing, so planned a route and got some rest. We slept so soundly that night.
WILD SPIRIT 