Most of Poland spends the long May weekend by the water — it’s almost a national sport. We thought we’d lost any chance of finding a quiet shore until we ended up here, ten minutes from the centre of Szczecin.
Lake Dabie is one of the largest lakes in Poland, sitting right on the edge of the city in the country’s far north-west, just shy of the German border. For two days it gave us white-tailed eagles circling overhead, herons standing perfectly still in the reeds, and long gravel paths running along the water. Pretty much exactly the kind of slow weekend in Poland with kids we keep coming back for.
O tym przeczytasz
Lake Dabie from the water
Szczecin looks like a different city from the water. First, it feels enormous. Second, you can tell the city is starting to realise just how much it has in all this water. We had a perfect day for it, so we took a boat out on the Oder and across part of Lake Dabie, saving the concrete shipwreck for the end.
Before we get to the lake itself though — we always seem to get lucky with people. Our skipper was Maks. He clearly knew he had kids on board: he slowed down when Jas realised that stripping down to short sleeves had been a bad call and needed to scramble back into a jumper, and he kept pointing things out for them — like the giant gantry cranes in the Szczecin port. Someone with real knowledge of the city. He won the kids over completely by letting them climb on and inside the Dar Szczecina, the Polish sail training ship moored at the marina where we set off.
Back to the lake — we honestly envy people who live in Szczecin. The further out we got, the harder it was to believe we were ten minutes from a city centre. The city has set up eight spots around the lake where you can moor your boat, grill some food, sit for a while. One of them is in a cove that was used to hide German U-boats during the war.
What kept catching our eye though was our national bird, the white-tailed eagle. Lake Dabie is its biggest habitat in Poland, and a few of them passed overhead during the trip. The grey herons standing motionless on the shore were almost as striking.
At the northern end of the lake the wind dropped to nothing. The water turned glass-flat and for a few minutes it was genuinely hard to tell where the sky ended and the lake began. It reminded us a little of Salar de Uyuni — not the place itself, more that strange feeling of hanging suspended between water and sky.
What we’d really been waiting for was the “concrete one” — a shipwreck on the north-western side of the lake. It’s wild that something built out of concrete could float in the first place, and that became our impromptu physics lesson for the kids, with Archimedes leading the way.
A gravel ride along the lake to Czarna Laka
The lake was with us every day — we’d parked our campervan at the marina campsite. And since we’d brought the bikes, there was no way we weren’t going to ride along it. Especially because the path starts right at the marina: tarmac at first, then it turns to gravel as soon as you reach the open water.
The whole route is flat, no thinking required. The kind of ride where being on the road matters more than getting anywhere in particular.
One minute we were riding right by the water, the next we were between reeds and fields. The kids kept stopping — for sticks, frogs, snails, all the things adults walk straight past without seeing. We did about fifteen kilometres to Czarna Laka, a small village on the other side, but you could easily go much further. The older two got to properly test their new e-bikes, and for Basia we had the kid-tow we’d already trusted on mountain trails in the Dolomites.
The route around Dabie is genuinely beautiful. It’s the kind of ride we’d give to anyone easing kids into longer days outside, with grilling spots set up by the city if you want to make a whole day of it.
We were heading back in the late afternoon. The sun was getting lower and that’s when the mosquitoes appeared — whole clouds of freshly hatched ones hanging over the path like mist. They only let up as we got closer to the city, and that’s when he showed up. The beaver everyone had been waiting for, paddling slowly down a small canal. A perfect ending to a ride along Lake Dabie.
A sauna by the lake
It turned out the day could still get better. A friend from Szczecin — a serious sauna fan — let us know that right next to our campsite there was a great little sauna spot, on the edge of Lake Dabie itself. We weren’t going to say no to that. Ninety degrees in the sauna and a sprint into the lake. I don’t think we’ve ever slept that well.
This post was made in partnership with the City of Szczecin — big thanks for the invitation.
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