We left early and had a good sail to Gdańsk in the rising wind 20 + knots as the storm approached, we would later realise that we had done well to get in before the wind, as it lasted over a week. Gdańsk is a great place to be stuck, when we think of some other places we could have been in. The feature photo is of Brenda dipping the ensign to the war memorial. This stands on the site of the first shots of WW2 when Germany attacked Poland. We later cycled to it and learned a lot more about the events that started the war. Gdańsk also has a large war museum, in which we spent 5 hours. The old city suffered badly in the war especially when the Russians came in at the end, amazingly the old city has been virtually rebuilt as it was, outside the old city there are still a lot of buildings in a state of ruin from those bombardments. It was interesting to try and understand the History of Poland, I’m not going to try and explain it on this blog except to say that after the war along with quite a few other countries they were given away to Russia and they lost their freedoms. Not until the solidarity movement in the 80s did things change and now as members of Europe they are enjoying life as free citizens. Poland lost more civilians in ww2 than any other country, almost 6 million compared to the U.K. 62 thousand. We also visited the Amber museum Amber is found on this coastline. On our cycle tours we found an old U boat factory, The HQ of the Nazi party, the first Tank to liberate Gdańsk from the Germans, apparently it keeps getting vandalised with paint as people don’t like the Russians, lots of Churches, the Town Hall, another tower to climb. One of the largest and earliest water mills in Europe. In the centre stands a 15 century crane that was propelled by men in a hamster wheel to unload ships. Of course we were moored in the world famous Gdańsk shipyards. Add to all this very reasonably priced food and yacht moorings, a great place to be stuck in a storm. Because we were 6 miles inland the winds weren’t a problem, we had a few rain showers but mostly nice days.