Speeding East

30th July, 2016

Next stop, middle of nowhere somewhere in Poland. We needed to do some kms today and Poland is bigger than you think. The middle of nowhere corresponded therefore to where we would get to after the kms we needed to do. Quite an exact science.

On the way we lunched on the Baltic - our first real view and whilst we were still in Germany, perhaps we should say the Ostsee. Clearly very post-communist now and very post-communist prices - one does wonder what this place would have been like 30 years ago?

As Poland still has the Zloty we wondered whether there would be a 'real' border or not? We were pretty sure that we had crossed the border but then we hit a very official looking queue and we thought passport or currency control? But once the queue had got round the bend we could see it was another of those places that Woolwich ferries had been retired to. If we had been able to read Polish we would have sauntered to the front........

      

If we could read Polish we would also probably be able to pronounce where we we were heading to; Hotel Swietoborzec via Szczerin via Swinoujscie. But we can't.

We nonetheless got there. Poland needs motorways. The A roads have 50 and 70km/h speed limits every time you go past a barn, turning, village, town despite being on a dual carriageway. It is slow. So slow that it was faster sometimes to go on single track B roads where there were the barns and the turnings but not the villages and the towns and they had clearly run out of speed limit signs.



But then one hits another A road and forgets and has to show your license to a policeman......... Luckily he seemed impressed by the names of the countries we had visited stuck on the windscreen and we showed him the soon to be applied Polish flag sticker...

Onward to Gdansk the following day and the roads were similarly painful but this time we were expecting it and it wasn't that far to go. Nothing scenic though. Once you have done ten minutes on straight, flat roads through pine trees with not much else to see then you have done the route. Oh, look - there's a silver birch there! Or ten thousand...