Tag Archives: ustronie morskie

August 16, 2011 · 9:35 pm

Lampiony

Tonight is our last night in Ustronie Morskie, and it has been a wonderful vacation.  It’s not exactly Ibiza, the Baltic is not exactly the Mediterranean but there’s a playground in front of the apartment where we are staying, the kids

Actually, I don't know what they're called in English

have made friends and it was actually warm enough the last couple of days to get in and swim, at least for a couple of seconds.

We played some air hockey, rode a train (not a real train, it’s just a truck with trailers dressed up  to look like a train, it goes on the road), built sand castles, saw a football game (women and children were free, I had to pay 5 zloty, which is about two bucks), toured a botanical garden, saw a “bread museum” which was really just a bakery dressed up for the tourists, learned a few words of Polish and watched the lampiony.  Isabel, especially, loved the lampiony.

The first one I saw, up in the sky, I thought it was somebody parasailing with a light.  Then we saw somebody trying to set one off from the beach, with great difficulty.  Then we started seeing them everywhere.  It’s like a little hot air balloon without a basket.  Not big enough for passengers, just about the size of a large helium balloon and flies about the same way but, because there’s a flame, it looks like a really brilliant star flying low through the night sky.

Tonight, on our way home from the restaurant (which was really more like a bar on the beach – the food was mediocre, the band was out of place playing 60s hits like Smoke on the Water loudly and with heavy Polish accents but the view was spectacular, the waitress was friendly and the price was actually better than reasonable) we saw dozens of them, all drifting in the same direction like boats floating with the current of a river and it was a good opportunity to explain to Sam about the relative distances of them, a passing airplane and the stars.

Isabel wasn’t listening to me.  She was just entranced.

Anyway, the kids are saying they’d like to come back here again next year, which isn’t actually my plan but it means they had a good vacation.  Which means I had a good vacation.

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August 14, 2011 · 9:31 pm

More Notes From the Baltic Coast

Yesterday we spent the morning at a Botanical Garden.  I didn’t expect much and so was pleasantly  surprised – in fact, really impressed.  They  had several sections: a Japanese garden, a formal garden, a rocky viewpoint area over some Greek statues

The Main Beach

where we took some great photos of the kids, a “garden of the senses” which really could have been better, but it was all beautiful and there was a couple there getting their wedding photos taken.

Then, in the afternoon, it actually warmed up enough to go to the beach and, as I guessed, it was packed.  You had to pick your way through (everybody here has these tent-peg and cloth dividers that they wrap around their party, partly to block out wind but also, I guess, for a bit of privacy) to get to the beach.

This morning was foggy and my wife suggested more touristy sight seeing, which I was for, but the kids were screaming for an immediate return to the beach.  We gave in, but I suggested that instead of walking straight down to the beach, we walk through the forest for about 20 minutes or so first, to get to a less crowded spot.  Of course, that idea was met with wailing and arguments, but my wife backed me up and we prevailed, sort of.  The kids started whining after about 5 minutes and I said give it at least 10 minutes more and then the path led down to the beach anyway.

We’d only gone a couple of hundred meters, but it was noticeably less crowded.  We managed to plant our towel close enough to the sea that there was nobody between us and Sweden and we built an awesome sand castle.  One other thing – as I looked around the beach yesterday I thought “My god, what a bunch of old, fat, horribly unattractive people.” (admission:  I’m no spring chicken myself, and noticeably on the chubby  side)    I didn’t see more than two or three reasonably attractive women all day.

Today was quite different.  I’m not sure if it’s just because all the old folks won’t walk more than the minimum distance or if it’s because further down the beach is next to the campsites, which is a different demographic than the hotels in town, but it was noticeable.  Oh boy, was it noticeable.

It reminded me a bit of our trip to the Grand Canyon, when I was 16.  Me and two of my brothers walked down to the bottom.  I noticed when we got down there that there were no wrinkly, fat old people with their trailers and their lawn chairs and their TVs, who were so much a part of the campsite along the rim.

I guess there’s nothing wrong with that.  But it’s a big, big world with  lots of empty space in it and sometimes all  you  have to  do to  get away from the crowd is to walk a bit further down the beach.

 

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August 10, 2011 · 6:59 pm

Ustronie Morskie

Well, here we are in beautiful Ustronie Morskie, Coney Island on the Baltic, it’s sort of like Ibiza except that instead of hip young college kids from all over the world, you’ve got lots of Polish people with little kids and a sprinkling of Czechs and Germans.  I

Mercede and Bristol, back when they were still friends and before Bristol went all Michael Jackson with the plastic surgery

yelled at my daughter in English and a few people looked around curiously, like “what language is that?”

The sky is gray, it’s windy as hell and very unsummerlike but as we walked along the beach today I realized what a good thing that was.  We took a lovely, long walk along a relatively uncrowded beach  and I knew that the only reason it was uncrowded was because the sun wasn’t out.  I do hope we get in a few swimming days this vacation,  and I know the kids will be seriously bummed if  we don’t, but today was lovely.

Anyway, I’ve been off the internet for 2 days and the world hasn’t come to an end.  It hasn’t gotten any better – the Democrats failed to retake the state Senate in Wisconsin, and somehow Kathy Nicklaus had a hand in that again.  How the hell does she keep getting away with it?  Liberal pundits are trying to spin it as a liberal victory, but that’s bullshit.  They stole another one.

Mercede Johnston posed for Playboy, apparently, which raises two very interesting questions.  1. Does anybody buy Playboy any more? and 2. Why?  Don’t they have the internet?

Speaking of the Johnston-Palin clan,  Track’s wife Britta, who he married 3 months ago, gave birth to a baby girl, which confirmed what everybody suspected about the reason for their wedding.  Kyla Grace.  At least the girls in that family don’t get names like Track, Trig, and Tripp.

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