In northwest Poland, in a tiny village called Nowe Czarnowo, very near the town of Gryfino, you will find a cluster – a grove, really – of unusual pine trees.  The locals call this place Krzywy Las, which in English means “crooked forest”. I recently learned they also call it the “Fairy Tale Forest”, and with Hansel and Gretel in mind, I can absolutely see how that name suits. At one time, there were about 400 of these mysteriously curved pines growing together in an unusual manner that has never been fully explained.  How’s that for creepy? Eat your heart out Brother’s Grimm.  Anyway, Allita learned of this unique conifer forest while reading a National Geographic magazine in the third grade.  Since late 2015, she has wanted to witness the beauty and wonder of this treasured Polish natural monument.  So, the next step on our Sweet 16 summer trip through Europe was Poland.

The Crooked Forest is actually the main reason why we took possession of a rental vehicle in Frankfurt.  Having the vehicle also made it easier for us to get to our B&B from Frankfurt since we could just drive there without any connections or train changes and could save having to figure out the Berlin train system for another day. Also, Berlin is not a city easily traversed by foot while dragging multiple suitcases – remember how big I said it was? Having a car is sometimes a good idea; however, parking is always a factor and, lots of personal automobile driving in Germany is not exactly stress-free – let’s face it, most Germans are better drivers than most Americans (myself included – particularly since this is not my native country or language, and the international traffic signs are also foreign).  Further, as a general rule, we prefer to use mass transit such as trains, busses, streetcars, subways, etc.  Personally, I enjoy being able to look away from the road and enjoy the sights we pass.  Allita enjoys not having to navigate.  That said, this trip to the wilds of Poland somewhat mandated a personal vehicle as you simply “can’t get there from here” using public transportation.  

I’m not going to go into great detail about how we traveled from Berlin to the Polish forest except to say this: if Allita and I had not already spent hours studying various maps and reading as much as we could in advance, we would still be driving around rural West Pomerania.  First, there is only a tiny road sign visible barely 10 meters from the turn into the maximum 3-car, unpaved parking lot that also doubles as a maintenance road for the Dolan Odra Power Plant.  Parking there gave us great confidence, I promise you.  Second: Have you ever been to rural Poland? I’ve not seen anything like it. Literally, one town stops when another one begins. Seriously! It’s mind-boggling. Blink and you miss the name of the town where you currently are located and there is absolutely no way a GPS is going to find you on these roads. Fuhgeddaboudit. Third:  Even after we parked in the tiny clearing in the woods off the side of the road (see previous comment re: parking lot), we were not fully convinced we were in the correct place until we looked way up high in the trees, far over our heads, and found some tiny, camouflaged signs with directional arrows.  Photos below show some of what I am trying to explain to you – Allita is a tall girl, you can see where the signs are – it’s like “Who are you targeting here? Giants?”  Anyway, somehow, miraculously, we spent about an hour hiking around and exploring the extremely lush, green area, and enjoyed a morning snack in the cool woods before moving along back to Gryfino and, eventually, Szczecin.  

I loved these two signs depicting the various theories on how this forest came to exist.  Whatever you may believe, it is fascinating to observe.  Further, Allita and I noted a large number of other pines in the same wooded area that are very curved near the middle or top instead of the bottom so it made us wonder if that phenomenon was not still occurring periodically.  Good thing it was a cold, overcast day – I mean, I would not have been at all surprised to see a fairy, goblin or unicorn just pop out of the trees.  Allita said she was looking for wolves.

Szczecin, Poland is massive.  I didn’t know that.  Did you know that?  It feels like I should have known that before I attempted to drive around the city.  In fact, it is the 7th largest city in Poland.  Surprise, surprise.  We saw Bazylika archikatedralna św. Jakuba Apostoła (Saint James the Apostle Archcathedral Basilica), a bit of the  Szczecin Castle (Pomeranian Duke’s Castle), the Muzeum Narodowe w Szczecinie (National Museum of Szczecin), the Red Town hall, a lot of bodies of water of which I can not remember the names, and, the one place I wanted to visit in person, Stare Miasto (Old Town) with the famous old market square called the Rynek.  Most of what we saw of Szczecin was from the car and I’m not sure I could recreate the tour as it was somewhat haphazard and may have involved some profanity (sorry, Mom).  We did finally find a parking lot (this time maybe 10 cars big?) with a meter that used a credit card – as we do not own any Zloty (Polish currency – I feel like I could have a rant about the EU countries that don’t use the Euro but I’m going to skip that for now) – and we explored all of Old Town on foot.  That was lovely.  My own little personal reward for the torture of driving in this country.  

After a lot of discussion with the British-accented, female voice of our rental car’s GPS, we finally returned to the sanity of Germany and made our way to the nearest interesting Gasthaus on the route to Hamburg.  Wouldn’t you know, it was a castle?  Schloss-Hotel Bredenfelde, built in 1850, appeared quite lovely in the evening light and the management were surprised and delighted to host us for the evening.  They are so far off the beaten path (the ideal place for us blue-roaders) that by 7pm, they had cleaned up Abendessen (evening meal) and were starting to call it a day.  We parked our rental car in another unpaved parking lot, this time somewhat bigger and next door to a barn full of cows, trouped in to register and get the grand tour (15 guest room apartments, banquet hall, fireplace room, wine vault, breakfast room in the garden kitchens, variety of interesting architecture, decorations and furniture throughout), eventually finished our travel snacks for which we were utterly grateful by that time, and fell asleep. 

The next morning, we stayed true to our countryside route and slowly made our way to Hamburg, stopping only once in the absolutely lovely town of Schwerin, which is also the capital of the German state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern.  The city itself has around a dozen lakes IN it.  So, yes, we spent most of our time there oogling the massive bodies of water so foreign to our Arizonan eyes.  On an island in the Schweriner See (Lake Schwerin), the largest of the lakes in the city, sits the massive castle, Schweriner Schloss (Schwerin Castle), once home to the Grand Duke himself.  This absolutely phenomenal architectural construct was our main reason for detouring slightly into the city.  Records of this castle go back as far as 973 A.D.  Makes sense when you see how it is situation on the water – the ideal place to set up defendable headquarters really. In some of the photos Allita took, you can see the golden dome and other golden ornamentation on the castle.  I will mention here that when I lived in Germany in the 1980s, Schwerin was in East Germany and not accessible.  Neither was Schloss-Hotel Bredenfelde or any of the little villages (dorfs) through which we traveled in the periodic rainfall today as we made our way gradually to Hamburg from Poland.  It was a fabulous journey and, even after all this time, you can still see how different this Eastern region, once in the Soviet Occupied Zone, is from those rural areas outside Frankfurt and Berlin that remained in the West. 

Tonight, we turned in our rental car (finally!) and made our way to another lovely B&B in southern portion of the quiet, family-friendly, Hamburg-Nord (Northern Hamburg) neighborhood.  Tomorrow, we explore Hamburg!  And yes, we did have a bit of a giggle about Frankfurters, Berliners, and Hamburgers – I admit it.