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Leaving early-ish this morning to follow Tomaśz’s recommendation to take an infernal day-trip in the Hel peninsula. It’s a very thin stray of land facing Gdańsk and Gdynia, covered with forest and sandy beaches. If it wasn’t for his advices, I would have never know there was a train going all the way to the end of the peninsula.

As unimpressive as the first train to Gdynia was, Duha got the immense honor to share the prestigious 100th train of the Great European Train Tour! 🎉 That number includes also 23 metros, tram, funiculars and suspended monorails, so true trains are actually talling at 77 right now, but still, that quite the figure. Can you imagine, taking 100 trains? Yeah, me neither.

Here’s to a couple hundred more!

Anyway, after a quick change, we got into the palyndromic 101st train (Duha was more impressed by that), a much smaller regional affair. We had a good laugh when the controller came to check our tickets. He didn’t speak any English, and it was pretty obvious that he had never seen an Interrail pass before, as he thought we had train tickets from another train carrier. We kinda managed to explain as I could see the struggle within him through his eyes (and Google translations) and he gave up. Ah… Polish trains…

I honestly didn’t expect this ride to be this scenic. As we entered the peninsula, we were running along the sea, until we reached a wider portion and crossed straight to a very cute pine tree forest. We would have gladly hiked through it, had we planned our day a bit more thoroughly.

However, when we arrived in Hel [Hek, Poland], we found a cute touristic village, that was obvisouly quite dead outside summer. Nobody we met spoke English there, so I assume it’s a Polish summer favourite. It took a while to take a restaurant, but when I heard the Iron Maiden banger « Tears of a Clown », I was sold for the AC/DC-themed restaurant.

After that, we walked on the beach and went to visit the Fokarium: it’s a healing center for seals that get injured in the area. They have four permanent resisdents, grey seals that can’t be released in the while for various reasons. They seemed curious about people coming to watch them. Despite their impressive size and bulkiness, they swim pretty fast, and most of the time on their backs for some reasons.

A coffee and a pastry later, we were back on the regional train, leaving this peaceful and beautiful peninsula, and stopped in Gdynia.

Because today, we’re meeting with yet another old friend from the TrackMania scene, Kamil. We’ve talked quite a bit together for the last 10+ years, so it was amazing to finally meet with the comedy and shortcuts genius. He came with his girlfriend Dominika, and they took us around for a tour on the Gdynia docks at night.

We ended up taking a drink all together, before they had to leave early (working in the morning, I don’t envy that ngl). I also got handed in person a small prize of postcard, magnet and stickers that I had won a few months ago for a guessing game Kamil held. It was a lovely evening, and I only wish we could have spend more time talking.

But we were also tired, and still had one more train to take us back to Gdańsk, where we ended the day with a classic French-Turkish dinner: Kebab and wine.