Our Trip to Pommern:

Some Details 

1. We hired a translator / guide for our trip to Pommern (that is, for Poland.) The guide is a young woman who did a lot of research on the individual churches we want to see and who spends some time doing Pommern research in archives. It is my opinion that it would be a whole lot cheaper to pay a professional -- who could take the time to develop a relationship with the archivists -- than to try to look through ourselves.

2. We flew into Berlin, but we left right away to avoid high hotel room rates.

3. In Berlin, we rented an Opal station wagon (not a mini van) that was about the equivalent of a Ford Taurus wagon, though it is a GM car. Four of us, good-sized Pommern descendants, fit very comfortably into the car with all our stuff. We used Avis preferred status to get this car on an upgrade and for the entire week I think the car cost about $240. It was a diesel engine and diesel fuel was cheaper, substantially, than gasoline. We paid a very small amount of extra insurance to take the car into Poland, as I recall, but not much. We had absolutely no problems related to the car. Total cost, with a week of driving as far south as Eisenach, back up north to Hameln, back over to Lake Mueritz, and back down to Berlin, was around $400 in April 2000.

4. We crossed the border the first night into Poland -- a Sunday night. The lines were very long. (Doing it again, we would cross on weekdays, I guess.) We were pretty much just waived through by the customs people, coming and going, when our turn finally came.

4. We spent our first night at the Hotel Orbis Reda in Stettin. The food was good by our plebian standards, the staff friendly. The hotel parking lot is guarded. The following night we stayed at the Orbis Hotel in Kolberg.

5. We really did not do much traveling "around" Pommern -- we stayed within shouting distance of Kreis Greifenberg the whole time. We spent a night "Under the Wagon" in Treptow, at a hotel we would probably use as our headquarters next trip. It is:

Pensjonat "Pod Wozem"

ul. II-go Pułku Ułañow 8

72-320 Trzebiatów

Polska

Tel: (091) 72-188

Room 1 = PZL 60

Room 2 = PZL 100

Room 3 = PZL 230

Room 4 = PZL 150

Apartment = PZL 160

Breakfast = + PZL 10

Mark Pautz has pictures of this place on his website,which is where I stole the above information. His site is one of the best for Pommern travelers to get a view of the nitty-gritty.

The pension was filled with engineers working at the Treptow military facility the night we were there -- the innkeepers were pleasant and accommodating. Toilets and showers for our room were shared. Greifenberg has lots of markets and Treptow has a few, so perhaps one could do without the +PZL10 (in 1999) breakfast in favor of something else.

6. I cannot emphasize enough how the Polish guide opened doors for us. We would never dream of doing a trip like this without a personable and well-informed native person.