First Impressions: First Day in Poland

Yesterday’s Journey 

Our day started after breakfast in Dresden piling our bags into our little white van that we call Petra the Peugeot; all our vehicles have names and Petra was bought second hand from a friend whose name is Peter. Our little black VW Golf was also bought second hand, when my daughter took possession her new car. She had named the VW Marcus. We tried to re-christen Marcus, changing the sex to female started her new life with us as Marcia thinking that all cars should be female, but my daughter Jacqueline was outraged by this suggestion and nagged so much about it, that we caved and went back to Marcus. 

From Dresden we took the route suggested by Google maps, first to Berlin then later turning off in the direction of Gdansk; our destination of Gdynia is one of triplet city’s with Gdansk and Sopot. Rest stops were rare. The Polish scenery on the route we took was the E28- A6 where the scenery was very much like all the country side we had driven through approaching Dresden since we were driving in what had been known as East Germany that had been cut off by The Wall. We had expected there to be hundred of miles of forest and we were right in that assumption. There were areas where in was undulating and opened here an there on to moor for a while, but mostly there was forest, forest and more forest. Trees are very beautiful but they do block off the rest of the countryside that one is driving though. 

The breaks in the trees gave way instantly to huge wind farms and now and again solar panel farms, in fact I have never seen so many. It’s almost as if having thankfully done away with that dreadful 'Wall' barrier and discovered the vast expanses of nature, that the powers in charge during that time thought “Hey, here is a place where there are so few people that there is nobody to object to a mass installation of modern power sources.” I would say that every town or village had its own wind farm except that I didn’t see many towns and villages. Wherever your eyes fell there was a wind farm, either near or far. Rest stops were small compared to motorway standards, just a petrol station with a small shop or café. 

There was little in the way of dual carriageway and very often utterly atrocious road surface. Hundreds of miles of the roads were just single lane and we witnessed an abundance of death defying overtaking even on double centre lines and bends. We became fascinated with the concrete bus stops that always had a person there who was selling produce using the cover of the bus shelter as a makeshift store. The main items for sale that we noticed in passing were honey, in large jars and some with big jars of wild mushrooms that there would be no shortage of in the endless world of trees. A few were selling melon and apples. There were also four sightings all in the middle of nowhere, truly miles from anywhere, of young women with long blonde hair, wearing very tight short shorts and high heels either standing or sitting on folding chairs: They were all holding umbrellas because it was drizzling. 

The poor quality narrow roads lasted until we drew closer to the suburbs of Gdynia and Gdansk and finally into heavy modern city traffic. It was a long day on the road since we had started off at 8.45am and did not get to our hotel until 7pm. We got to the end of our first Audio book of our holiday, Obsession by Nora Roberts. We both enjoyed the book that was about a serial killer, the affects on his family and a follower’s obsession with the imprisoned killer’s M.O. Steve lost to plot a little with the love story that is intertwined and explored at length.  I thoroughly enjoyed the book and there was a personal thread for me because the main female character is a talented photographer as is my daughter and she adopts a dog she finds on the road that she calls Tag, that is another link to my daughter Jakki since her first pet was a Rough Collie dog called Tag who we all adored. 

Once that story ended we started Desperation, written and read by Stephen King. This one should last us for the rest of the holiday and much or maybe even all the return journey since it is predicted to last for 21 hours according to the blurb from Audible.

 

 

One of Jakki' fun photo's of her present dog Louis taken in the Bluebell woods earlier in the year.