Bydgoszcz (Bromberg)

July 09-11, 2024

Click pics for larger scale!

If I wasn’t already almost a year older, I would have thought I was at the start of our Oman trip when we were exposed to a merciless heatwave on the route through the Balkans. 38° C and a strong easterly wind, plus repeated topographical pinpricks of short, crisp climbs make the final 115 km long royal stage to Bydgoszcz a real physical and mental challenge.

Once I arrive at the stage finish, however, I am rewarded for my sweat: Bydgoszcz welcomes me with a beautiful city centre characterised by a combination of historical and modern architecture in a successful symbiosis. I spontaneously decide to take a rest day, which in view of the weather forecast seems to be the better choice anyway.

And here I come back to the topic of hospitality:

From the very beginning, one of my travel destinations was to meet up with the young Polish woman Joanna from Warsaw, whom I met by chance on the ferry from the Hel peninsula to Gdańsk during my Baltic Sea cycling trip in 2009. During the three-hour crossing, we became surprisingly close in an intense conversation and have never lost touch since then. Now, 15 years later, we are finally going to meet again. But that’s not all: Joanna is so insistent that I spend more time than the planned one day as a guest of her young family, and offers to pick me up early in her car, that I have no chance of refusing. The prospect of reaching Warsaw dry makes it quite easy for me to agree to her suggestion, not least in view of the sudden and still threatening thunderstorms.

After a stormy, rainy night, I start the onward journey to the meeting with Joanna in Sochaczew early in the morning, but only after a telephone congratulation to my beloved mother in Cologne, to her 98th Birthday! My thoughts belong first and foremost hers today.