The Long Road to Gdansk and the Morning Post.

Ever found yourself considering a driving holiday to Northern Poland? Stop, think carefully and book yourself on the next flight to Torremolinos. It’ll be awful, yes, but nothing, I repeat NOTHING in comparison to this. We drove the sauna through the night, being overtaken at various points on the cobbled tracks by a lorry full of jangling calor gas cylinders, a car towing a four metre trailer, 16 UPS trucks carrying the morning post and... wait for it... a house, on the back of a flatbed
truck.

You might think we were going slowly, but the sauna’s wooden needle barely dipped below sixty for the whole journey.

We’re now also in a position to confirm that the Daily Mail are wrong in their assertion that every Polish man under 40 is living illegally in a flat in East Anglia. They are in fact in Gdansk, thumbing their rosaries with one hand while the other hangs nonchalantly out the car window leaving the sturdy Polish thighs to do the bulk of the driving through the rush hour.

All this has rather taken it out of us. After a six hour non-stop drive from Berlin,
Sven and indeed the Sauna have developed chest infections – we’re wondering if the towels might be to blame – and Lars is now muttering incomprehensibly for much of the time. Our brief nap in the Polish woods did little to enhance our general wellbeing. We boarded the ferry to Stockholm (at ridiculous and unexpected expense) and hope to make the Swedish capital by afternoon on Thursday.

The sauna, having sounded “agricultural” for much of the journey – a Czech man made a point of stopping to point at it: “Traktor, tuc?!” – is now verging on the asthmatic and the electrics seem to be suffering from the damp weather. After five days of glorious sunshine, Gdansk gloom instantly put pay to our already ailing windscreen wipers – I can understand why Lech Walesa was so fed up.