Gdansk Group Trip – Day 4 (Public Transport Debacle)

The task that we all had for the fourth day was to make it to Oliwa, two of us from Gdynia and four from Gdansk. This sounded a relatively easy task, the public transport in the Tricity is excellent. However, it’s not idiot proof as we discovered.

Richard and I got muddled up and weren’t confident that we should be on the train that we were, so we got off at Sopot and boarded a different one. I decided to go to the front of the train to seek a conductor, but they didn’t seem bothered about the situation, but we didn’t want to risk it further. The mistake that we made was not realising that the SKM train service wasn’t listed on the boards or screens, so the trains were there but we waited for a regional train which were much more infrequent. No real problems for us, but it took us longer to make the journey than it needed to.

Finally in Oliwa. Fortunately, the others had patiently waited at a cafe for us and hadn’t started on the day’s activities.

The others hadn’t fared much better on their travels. Bev and Susanna bought senior tickets successfully and Ross said “same again” and managed to get a senior ticket for himself which isn’t really what he wanted. Two of them also had tickets to different locations to the other for reasons unknown. However, the most exciting was yet to come, Susanna didn’t realise that she needed to validate her train ticket on the platform and got sternly told off by a train guard. After apologising and appealing to the guard’s sense of fair play, given that they at least had tickets the guard decided to let them off. Thanks to Steve for this photo and it seems as if he was the only person who knew how to purchase the correct ticket. He’s very sensible is that Steve.