I had a bad night’s sleep, disturbed by the incessant need to cough and blow my nose. This was a bit of a nuisance as we had a fair bit of driving to do today. We were due to pick the car up by the main ferry terminal at 09:30 and in order to do that we needed to catch the 09:00 local ferry across and walk down. Everything worked very smoothly, the car was delivered bang on time and moreover, it was a higher spec than that which we ordered. We had booked a manual Renault Captur but what we actually got was a Renault Meganne automatic, with only 6000km on the clock. A very nice car indeed. Unfortunately, the car didn’t have the local number plate (SWZ), rather it had a Warsaw registration. That meant that we were precluded from using the local ferry as this is for town citizens and their cars only but that didn’t stop us trying, I went there in the hope that it would be half empty and they would take pity on me. It wasn’t and they didn’t, I was sent away with a flea in my ear by a local driver! We therefore had no choice other than to drive the 6 km down the canal to the main ferry and join a queue there. Our road bisected the road leading to the ferry and this road was queued back as far as we could see. Naturally I tried to join the queue where our road met with the ferry road but a van driver (what is it about white vans?) took exception and drove across our nose and parked his van and got out to remonstrate – presumably he felt that we should have driven to the back of the queue (dream on!) but of course all his remonstrations were in vain as we have no inkling whatsoever of Polish, so he gave up and reversed to let us in. The joy of it was, that when we actually got onto the ferry, we were the last car and he was left on the shore, fuming!!

We got back to the boat without any further adventures and commenced loading the car and so on. The last thing we did was to close all 7 seacocks and finally turn all the batteries off and remove the shore power. Hopefully CW will sit there quietly for two weeks. By 12:00 we were off and went in search of the ferry queue. We had to wait over 30 minutes for our turn to board, 30 minutes that passed rather slowly apart from one hugely exciting few moments when a wild boar sow and 7 sizeable piglets crossed the road 20 yards away – how brilliant was that!

The drive to pick up Rosemary from her hotel in Szczecin took us past nothing but huge fields with a variety of crops growing, wheat, rye, corn etc etc – that and pine trees, loads of them. It was flat country, not particularly interesting to look at but the road was excellent and we zoomed along. There was some delay getting through the centre of Szczecin but we were able to advise Rosemary of our eta and she was waiting for us outside her hotel. At 14:45 then, we three were together and on our way to Poznan, another journey through nothing very much – the main bit of excitement was finding a parking space and prior to that negotiating our way through the centre of the old town, not a problem in theory  with SatNav which was built into the car but as one of the old squares was in the process of being renovated, there were an awful lot of temporary restrictions which kept us on our toes. After 6.5 hours of driving, we were now safely in Poznan, now all we needed to do was get into our rented apartment.

Rosemary  had been delegated the task of finding our accommodation and she chose apartments close to the city centre, our first being no exception. It is light and airy and consists of one large room with the bathroom in a separate room. The main area has a half wall which provides some privacy to the other bed, there are 2 beds and a divan here. We were very pleased with what we saw, a good start. By now I was too tired to contemplate going out in search of a restaurant so I suggested that we buy something from the supermarket across the road and we had ham, sausage & salad – just right, we all thought. The combination of little sleep due to my incessant cough and sniffling, together with a 6.5 hour drive together with the debilitating effects of the cold itself meant that by 21:00 I was dead on my feet and was in bed a few minutes later.