A half morning’s ride along the Baltic coast, and then I was heading south towards Szczecin to join the Oder River which I will be following south from now on.  Szczecin is at the bottom of a large bay into which the Oder runs, and so I was zigzagging a bit across county to get in to position so that I can follow the Oder.

Szczecin is, of course, Stettin from German days, as referenced by Churchill in his Iron Curtain speech in 1946 in Fulton Missouri in front of President Truman, when he talked of, “From Stettin in the Baltic, to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the continent”.  Anyhow, now it’s a Polish city called Szczecin.  From what I could see, it is a city with a 19th century elegance and wide boulevards, with about half the original buildings now replaced with communist concrete blocks, but the remaining and renovated original buildings - those that escape wartime bombing -  give a sense of grandeur from the past. There is a lot of development taking place in Szczecin at the moment, with an emphasis on the wide boulevards and perhaps returning them to pleasant places to walk up and down and spend time.

I had planned to eat Polish, something like local sausage, potatoes and sauerkraut, but struggled to find anywhere authentically Polish.  Instead, Szczecin has gone all ethnic, with an emphasis on Japanese, Thai and Viet.  I ended up eating Vietnamese.  Okay, I suppose.  

My lodgings were a perfectly nice small apartment in one of the old buildings, but with a faff getting in, opening key locks and going up some very steep stairs.  Once in it was perfectly fine.

Accommodation: Night of 17th June - Airbnb Marzena's Place Szczecin