My exploration today centered on the town of Toruń. Toruń, like Gdańsk and Malbork, was owned by the Teutonic knights. In fact, the town was founded by the knights who built their first fortification on the ruins of an older fort. This was eventually expanded and later the knights received permission to create a city….

Sadly, today I left the beautiful city of Gdańsk. After picking up my rental car I headed for the town of Toruń with a stop at Malbork Castle. I’ve been looking forward to visiting this castle ever since I started planning the trip. Malbork is the largest castle, by land area, in Europe as well…

Today was museum day. There are two museums that I had heard were must sees, the European Solidarity Museum and the Museum of the Second World War. The Solidarity museum explains the history of the Gdańsk shipyard strike, which was the first successful strike in Poland, and the unsuccessful strikes that had preceded it. Then…

Today started off with a very expensive breakfast. I was a bit lazy so I ate at the hotel this morning at a very ok buffet for around $20. Given that I saw options for close to half that walking around today I found it pricey. I spent a good part of the morning just…

This will be a short post as I have done a lot of traveling today. As the title should indicate, I am visiting Poland on this trip. After, around, 18 hours of travel; I believe I’m the first person in my family to go to Poland in 40-60 years. My great grandfather having come from…

A little departure from previous days, today did not involve a Christmas Market. Instead we headed to the Ecomusee d’Alsace; a museum dedicated to the preservation of historic homes from the region. Containing around 80 buildings from the region, the museum tries to show pieces of the day to day lives of historic Alsace. Fun…

Germany. That’s right, today we traveled to the German city of Heidelberg! The two draws were a ruined palace on the hill and a German Christmas Market instead of a French one. We got going a bit later so didn’t arrive until noon. Not that big of a deal for two reasons. First, the markets…

The entire day today was spent in the city of Colmar, know for its canals and picturesque streets. Colmar is also home to another series of Christmas Markets. We spent the day wandering the streets, once we were finally able to get to the town. Traffic was not fun. The town was filled with people…

Bit of a slow start today. We were to pick up our rental today but the wait was long and the first car we received had a malfunctioning GPS. This took a half hour to resolve, by switching cars, before we could even begin the journey to our first sight of the day. Due to…

This trip has me going to the Alsace region of France for several days as well as the heart of the country, Paris. For the first time in a while, I convinced some people to come with me on this trip. Mostly, by lying about how much walking would be involved. The three of us…