We were off and away according to schedule, on the road by 09:00. We’d ate and drank well over the past two nights and the total bill for the three of us, dinner, bed & breakfast for 2 nights, £260.00 in all – brilliant value.

The drive to Gdańsk took about 5 hours, the country was a little more interesting than we’d been through on previous treks, slightly hillier and with smaller fields, often with cows in for a change, rather than hectares of crops. We also skirted the lake district of Poland but to be fair, most of them were to the north of our route and unlike our Lake District, there were no mountains.

When we finally found our apartment in Gdańsk, we were amazed to find that it was a stone’s throw from where we were in CW in 2011, literally only a few yards. That part I remembered but sadly, the whole of the rest of Gdańsk was a bit of a blank to me. Never mind, it was every bit as nice the second time round!

Gdańsk lies at the mouth of the Motlawa River, connected to the Leniwka, a branch in the delta of the nearby Vistula River, which drains 60 percent of Poland and connects Gdańsk with Warsaw. Because of its location, Gdańsk has a long history and a very complex one, having experienced periods of rule under the Prussians, Poles, Germans and also as a free city and used to be known as Danzig. It is one of the Hanseatic cities in the Baltic and because it did not suffer overmuch during WW2 (at least the city didn’t but the people did), it is really worth a visit. Now we didn’t have a whole lot of time to see the city. Our original plan was to get into the apartment, do some clothes washing and leave for the rest of the day and go to see what we could of the place. However these plans came to a grinding halt when we were told by the company managing the apartment that we had originally been told that it was a 16:00 check in and if we wanted it earlier we were to have told them. We had done that, via email but they claimed not to have received it and if we wanted it opened earlier there would now be a 50 zloty charge. Even though 50 zloty is not a king’s ransom we were not impressed with the idea so we politely declined and changed plans, we would leave the car and do a little sightseeing there and then. Fortunately, a convenient spot became available in the street adjacent to the apartment block’s entrance so we wouldn’t have far to take our luggage when we finally could gain ingress.

Gdańsk is a very different city to the Gdańsk of yesteryear during the Soviet occupation period, I am quite certain. Today it is a vibrant place, heaving with visitors from all over the world and all over the city there were signs of active redevelopment with apartment blocks going up everywhere. The good thing about the apartments was that they were designed to meld into the cityscape, they had similar profiles to the Hanseatic period warehouses and so looked fine. As we only had 90 minutes or so to explore the town I won’t go into any detail here. For more information here is a URL , where there are some additional photos to mine as well