Gdańsk is a port that has been rich, ruined and rebuilt more than once, and the city wears all three eras at once. The old Hanseatic merchants of the Middle Ages grew fat on grain, timber and amber, and their tall, narrow merchant houses still line the Long Market, where the Neptune fountain gazes at the Gothic town hall. Almost everything in the old centre was flattened in 1945 and rebuilt with such care, from old paintings and plans, that the facades look centuries old. Along the Motława river the great wooden medieval crane still straddles the quay.
The city is also a place where modern history started. On 1 September 1939 the first shots of the Second World War were fired at Westerplatte, on the harbour mouth. Four decades later the Lenin Shipyard became the birthplace of Solidarity, the independent trade union led by Lech Wałęsa, and the strikes of August 1980 set in motion the peaceful unravelling of the Eastern Bloc. A museum in the old shipyard halls tells that story with unusual power.
For a rider the city itself is something to be ridden through carefully, with trams, cobbles on the old lanes and heavy traffic on the ring roads. The pleasure lies beyond. North of Gdańsk, the road follows the coast through Sopot and Gdynia, then out along the thin spit of the Hel Peninsula, with the Baltic on one side and the Bay of Puck on the other. It is flat and often windy, with sand, pines and wide skies. South-west, the Kashubian Lakes country rises into forested hills with winding lanes and small villages, a good place to find twisty roads in a region that is otherwise level.
Fuel is plentiful everywhere around the Tricity. Local food leans on fish, with smoked herring and fresh cod, and amber jewellery appears in every stall on Mariacka street. Come from May to September, but know that July weekends on the coast are packed and traffic crawls.