Picturesque cities such as Kraków and Gdańsk vie with energetic Warsaw for your urban attention. Elsewhere, woods, rivers, lakes and hills beckon for some fresh-air fun.
Our second stop today was a famous complex of bunkers from WWII (entrance 15 PLN, parking 10 PLN) in the Forest of Gierloz. The Wolfsschanze (Wolf’s Lair) was Adolf Hitler’s first Eastern Front military headquarters in World War II. The complex, which became one of several...
On the way to Mazurian Lake District, we made two stops. The first stop was the tiny village Święta Lipka (parking 20 PLN). Despite its size, it is well known religious center and a pilgrimage site. In fact, it is one of the most celebrated in the country. Within the monastery complex...
Tonight, we have parked in a historical town located within the Warmian-Masurian Voivodeship, in northern Poland. Lidzbark Warmiński was for a long time a religious and cultural center of the region under the control of the Warmian Bishops. During the years 1350 – 1795, it was the seat of...
Next two nights we spent in Olsztyn (Allenstein), the capital city of Poland’s Warmia-Masuria Province, which is famous for being called the ‘Polish Lake District’. The Teutonic Knights built an imposing castle there in 1334 along Łyna River, and the settlement that grew around it...
Our first stop in Eastern Poland was The Folk Architecture Museum and Ethnographic Park in Olsztynek (entrance 17 PLN, parking 15 PLN). It was established in 1909 when the authorities of Königsberg (the present-day Kaliningrad) decided to establish a museum of rural architecture in the...
Our next stop was seaport city Gdynia (parking 50 PLN), which lies on the coast of the Baltic Sea along the Gulf of Gdańsk, just northwest of Gdańsk city. First mentioned in 1253, Gdynia began as a fishing settlement. Major growth came only after World War I when Gdynia was returned from...
Cold weather and rain followed us to Hel – the sandbar peninsula in the Baltic Sea. The width of the peninsula varies from 100 meters to 3 kilometers. Since the peninsula was formed entirely of sand, it was in the past frequently turned into a chain of islands by winter storms. Nowadays a...
We spent another two days in a historic and utterly charming spectacular medieval town Toruń (listed in UNESCO). A city located in Northern Poland is the birthplace of the famous Nicolaus Copernicus. In the Middle Ages Toruń was a prominent trade center as a member of the Hanseatic...
It took us 278 km (Toll fees 40 PLN, Diesel 4,59 PLN / l at Orlen) to get into Poland’s third-largest city Łódź. Although the settlement here received its town charter from King Ladislaus Jagiełłon all the way back in 1423, the town didn’t experience rapid development until just 200...
Our first stop in Poland, this year, was Wieliczka Salt Mine (Graduation Tower 6 PLN, Salt Mine 100 PLN or 73 PLN in Polish, parking 40 PLN or 60 PLN with overnight). It’s a subterranean labyrinth of tunnels and chambers – about 300 km distributed over nine levels, the deepest being...