Jet setting on the Riviera

It's that Riviera Touch

Busy a lot lately and I've been trying to get in a blog entry at least once a month but - whoops - totally missed June! There's a lot been going on, I saw an ad for a trip to the the Polish Riviera and followed it up with a booking. We flew from Liverpool to Gdansk and found ourselves a few miles up the coast at Sopot a seaside spa town. This was the place to be in the 1920's and rich tourists flocked from all over Europe to be seen in the riviera of the north. Spot boasts the longest wooden pier in Europe plus some fine old hotels and a very good pedestrianised town centre. It's on the up and up and although there were very few foreign visitors when we we there there's obviously a big rejuvenation effort going on, with lots of construction etc.

The Sopot Lighthouse!

In anticipation of rising sea levels (and seemingly against local opposition) they're raising the height of the sea walls - we encountered a group of labourers from Cornwall enticed over by the prospects of €400 per day wages! We were particularly taken with the railway system and senior citizen tickets to the middle of Gdansk and north to Gdynia were cheap as chips. Gdansk was full of old churches and other attractive medieval buildings and, as in Sopot there were plenty of tourists, just that they were mostly Polish and mostly large groups of schoolchildren come from all over Poland to learn about their heritage. A week here was just about right, we found an excellent brewpub in Sopot with some fine ales, a larger brewpub by Gdansk railway station was a bit more prosaic with less exotic beers but the food was fine.
And, what a stroke of luck, we found a parkrun! Parkrun has been going on in Poland for several years and there are maybe seventy park runs in various locations in the country - we ran twice round a very pleasant park to add another country to our list.