Best of Poland – Number of Pre-Tour Days

Dear. Gdańsk is a part of tricity. So you can plan a lot for 2 days. You can take a sea tour only around tricity or day tour to hel peninsula
You can go to Sopot. City attached to Gdańsk and walk longest mol in Europe and enjoy time. Sopot has nice secessy architekturę. You can visit maritime museum in Gdańsk. You can go to Oliva district in Gdańsk with great part and cathedral Church. There is also great maritime museum in Gdynia next city of tricity.
You can make So lot..

For history, you can visit what is considered the best WWII museum in Europe, and see the Westerplatte peninsula where the first shots of WWII were fired.

Mariacka Street is well worth a stroll and the Gdansk (pro. gh-DA-insk) Crane is another attraction. Two-hours from Gdansk is Slowinski National Park. Gdansk is also a great place to buy amber.

In a word... yes! Arrive on Sunday you won't be disappointed

May I suggest checking out the Baltic coastline. Just north of the city you have beach resort towns like Sopot and large ones like Gdynia.

Gdynia has a wonderful beach side esplanade that goes for a few km following the coastline, very popular with locals.

Sopot is closer at only 45 min from Gdansk center via local commuter train. Sopot is a charming turn-of-the century seaside resort town, a favourite of the German Kaiser Wilhelm II.

I missed the WWII museum because I didn't find out in time that it was closed on Mondays. I was there for 4 days and loved Gdansk and would happily go back for more.

I was on the Best of Poland tour in September, and we arrived into Gdansk on Sunday afternoon checking into our airbnb around 3pm. I had signed up for a 1 hour canal boat ride Sunday evening just before sunset which was a fun orientation to the city, then we had a nice welcome to gdansk dinner and turned in for the night. On Monday all the City museums were free (which saved us 68zl each), but they were only open 12pm-6pm so we had to be mindful of time (but this also allowed us to sleep in a little and not feel bad for missing out). We were able to visit all 4 museums (Amber, Town hall & tower, Uphagen house, Artus court), have lunch at a milk bar and an ice cream break later, and still had time for quick visits to St. Nicolas, St Catherine’s and St. Bridget’s. Our plan for Tuesday morning/afternoon before the RS tour started was to visit the WWII museum which was also free that day (which would have saved 25zl each), however just our luck the museum was unexpectedly closed that day. This really put a wrench in our plans (and many others from our tour group who had also arrived early) knowing that we would be visiting the Solidarity museum on Wednesday as part of the tour, and didn’t want to necessarily visit two heavy museums back to back. But I can tell you, it is possible if forced to, but your feet will be screaming at you by the end of the day. So anyways, back to Tuesday…. So with our new free time we instead made our way back into old town exploring side streets along the way and toured St Mary’s Cathedral in depth (we did not climb the tower), back tracked any missed sites from the RS Gdansk walk part 1 & 2, and did some shopping along the main pedestrian street. This left us enough time for a rest at the hotel before our 5pm tour meet up.

On Wednesday, 1st day of tour, you will do a City walking tour from 9am-12pm, starting from the hotel walking along and crossing the canal, then more or less following most of route of the Part 1 & 2 book walk, a visit inside St Mary’s, and eventually ending at the shipyards and Solidarity museum. There is a rest break provided mid walk (15-20min) and treats were provided along the way as well. The Solidarity museum is explored on your own with no tour guide, and you will need to specifically ask for an audioguide if you want one. If I had known ahead of time that we would be on our own for this museum, I probably would have opted to visit the Solidarity museum on Tuesday (and paid for it ourselves) just to spread out the museums. Since we knew we were going to go straight to the WWII museum afterwards, we chose not to use an audioguide and kinda rushed ourselves through, but we still ended up spending a good 1.5hrs at the Solidarity museum. Then we walked to the WWII, got the audioguide, and we spent from 2pm till after 5pm exploring that massive museum. Since our feet were killing us and we were starving (didn’t stop for lunch), we choose to skip out on the included tour group vodka tasting at 5:45pm and we instead went straight to dinner on our own.

This was probably a long winded response for you, but I would totally vote for a Sunday arrival and take advantage of the City museums on Monday and WWII museum on Tuesday, then you could have a more relaxing Wednesday afternoon to visit whatever is left.

Depending on how much WW2 history you want to see apart from the big WW2 museum, there is also a grim Holocaust site, the camp close to Gdansk. The soldiers' military cemetery from the 19th century to WW2 is also located in Gdansk, accessible by public transport.