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The day started off with my (these days) typical 4 AM wake up. Going stir crazy waiting for the breakfast buffet to open, I listen to my comedy podcasts until the scrambled eggs beckon (Marc Maron, Doug Benson and Jimmy Pardo today).
At breakfast, I heard a non-Polish speaker attempt to fumble his way through ordering some coffee. Me, desperate for some conversation, pounced on him. He ended up being another bike tourist doing the Baltic Sea route all the way around the horn, to Finland from Berlin. A very nice guy named Michele. We swapped typical bike tourist lore ("Yes, the main highway out of town has a very nice shoulder for 15 kilometers. I highly recommend it") and parted ways.
The ride, as it has uniformly been here in Poland (except for you, Gdynia, goddamn you) was just wonderful. Just enough hills to keep it interesting, but not enough to make the heat a problem.
Along the way, I caught up to yet another bicycle tourist, this time from Germany, hauling a nicely made self-built trailer. He was on a two week jaunt along the north Baltic Coast. His name was Uwe and he was a big fan of lighthouses, so he took me to an old Prussian one in Utska, built in 1830. Here's my new buddy Uwe on top of the lighthouse:
Lunch consisted of Vanilla ice cream, coffee and languor by the sea.
I arrived in my destination, Darlowo, giddy and feeling like a million bucks. As I get closer and closer to Germany, the towns become more and more geared towards tourism, which means I'm feeling much less lonely and isolated. In the east, it was just me. I didn't see another bike tourist for the entire time I was out there, and nobody spoke English except the hotel and restaurant folks. Now, I saw about a dozen today, two of whom I had nice conversations with.
Darlowo is a completely charming town. I spent a couple of hours outside of the hotel, making a series of long overdue phonecalls back home. This little doggie came up to me and lay down on my feet for an hour while I was on the phone.
For the historically inclined, this region is called Pomerania (or Pomorze, in Polish, I think), and used to be a part of Poland, then Prussia, then a bunch of other things. When Napoleon came through here, he occupied Pomerania, along with the much of the rest of Poland. In 1812, Russia threatened to kick France out of Pomerania, presumably in order to take back control of it's territory in Poland. Napoleon countered by invading Russia, along with 90,000 Poles and 90,000 Germans. It ended disasterously for him, destroying his enormous army and is thought of as the beginning of the end for him. It also spelled the end of Poland's hopes for independence until after World War II. Coincidentally, I'm reading the exact chapters in War and Peace when Napoleon begins his invasion of Russia, and there's a lot of political and philosophical discussion about the causes of the war. Here's a photo of the castle where the old Pomeranian Dukes used to live, apparently:
Tomorrow, I skirt along the beach for most of the day and then I'm going to be camping for my first time since Austria, more than a month ago!
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