Stralsund's skyline tells you at once that this was a rich merchant town. Red-brick Gothic gables, pointed spires and the enormous bulk of the Marienkirche, whose tower rises more than a hundred metres, crowd the old town island, which is surrounded by water and linked to the mainland by causeways. In the Middle Ages, Stralsund was one of the leading members of the Hanseatic League, the trading alliance that dominated the Baltic, and together with Wismar its old town is a World Heritage site. In the harbour, the three-masted Gorch Fock I, a sail training ship, is moored, and the Ozeaneum, a striking modern museum of sea life, stands beside it.
The ride out is the draw, because from here you cross to Rügen, Germany's largest island. For years the only link was the Rügendamm, a causeway and bridge built in the 1930s, but a high new bridge opened in 2007 and carries the main traffic across the Strelasund. In the summer holidays the approach roads can back up for kilometres, so cross early or late, or in the shoulder seasons. On the island, the roads wind through low green hills, fields of rape and wheat, and avenues of old trees, with glimpses of blue sea.
Rügen has the famous chalk cliffs of the Jasmund peninsula, white walls that rise over the Baltic and are topped with beech forest, among them the Königsstuhl, a viewing point at about a hundred and eighteen metres. The painter Caspar David Friedrich made them a symbol of German Romanticism in the early nineteenth century. Seaside resorts such as Binz, with grand white villas along the promenade, and the little town of Putbus, a planned classical town of white houses built round a circular plaza, are well worth a look. The Baltic water is cold and shallow, and the beaches in the resorts are wide and sandy, with wicker beach chairs called Strandkörbe to shelter from the wind.
Fuel and food are no problem in Stralsund, a city of nearly sixty thousand, with stations on all main roads, and on Rügen the main towns have supplies, though prices rise in the summer. A fish sandwich, a Fischbrötchen, filled with herring, smoked salmon or crab, is the standard Baltic lunch, and best eaten at the harbour. The wind from the sea is brisk, so a windproof layer is wise, even in July, and sudden showers can drift in off the water.