Sopot Part One – Moho-Dream

From Poznań we headed north east towards Toruń. We’ve been pleasantly surprised at the quality of the roads in Poland, as we’d heard that they weren’t so good. There’s clearly a major road network upgrade in progress, though the downside of course is the charging of tolls on the new roads.

Just when you think you’ve seen it all… this was washing the barriers

Toruń is a medieval town where the only parking for the van was a busy coach park by the river next to a bridge with lots of traffic noise, so we spent the night at a campsite 25 km away in Ciechocinek, and drove to Toruń first thing the next morning.

It’s a pretty place with lots of Gothic style buildings and a couple of large squares. One of the few Polish towns not to have sustained any damage in WWII, it has unsurprisingly been declared a UNESCO World Heritage site. It’s famous in Poland for its gingerbread, so we visited the museum shop and bought some samples. It’s quite a small town and so we’d seen all we wanted to see by lunchtime. After a quick bite to eat we went back to the van and drove north to Sopot.

The Gothic looking Old Town Hall building in Toruń’s main square

I had to queue up behind some school kids to take this one…

Toruń was overrun with frogs many years ago

Not sure what this represents as there was no English translation

Krzywa Wieza – or the Leaning Tower of Toruń – those school kids were trying to push the building back up straight

Sandwiched between Gdynia to the north and Gdańsk to the south, Sopot is a pretty seaside town looking out over the Baltic Sea. Twinned with Southend-on-Sea – not far from our home in the UK – it’s a popular daytrip destination. We’ll be staying in Sopot for ten days or so, using it as a base to visit Gdansk and Gdynia on the train.

The campsite we’re staying at is the only one in the area, about 20 minutes walk from the town centre, and has only recently thrown open its doors for the 2018 season. They’re still getting the site ready, so there are quite a few noisy workmen around which isn’t ideal, but they’re giving us a 20% discount to make up for it, and we’ll be out most days anyway, so it shouldn’t be a problem.

This morning we walked along the seafront in the sunshine to the pier, which they claim is the longest wooden pier in Europe. After walking to the end of the pier we wandered through the town. It’s a lovely place, very clean with little litter or graffiti, unlike its twin over in England.