Vacation in Darłówko Without Excel
As soon as both Iza’s and Kasia’s accounting obligations to their clients ended—meaning that wonderful moment when, for a brief while, they aren’t thinking about invoices, tax returns, deadlines, and whether a stray digit has just decided to ruin their peaceful sleep—we headed to my friends’ place in Darłówko. It was one of those highly sensible decisions. You spend most of the year hunched over documents, so when the opportunity arises to look at the sea instead of Excel, there’s nothing left to do but pack up and go. Especially since the sea has one huge advantage over a spreadsheet: it doesn’t pop up with an error message.
Once we got there, it turned out that everything was conspiring to help us relax. The weather didn’t disappoint, the sea didn’t disappoint, the company didn’t disappoint, and a person could even start to think that life is actually quite a pleasant invention. The sun was shining, the wind was humming, the beach was right where it should be, and I slowly regained my belief that there is a world where the biggest problem is whether to get into the water right away or pretend to check the temperature for fifteen minutes first.
Military Vehicle Rally and a Time Machine
The 13th edition of the Military Vehicle and Historical Reenactment Group Rally was taking place in Darłówko. Until then, my knowledge of military vehicle rallies was roughly equivalent to the average person’s knowledge of how the Large Hadron Collider works. I knew such a thing existed, that vehicles drove around there, and that people were interested in it. That was the end of my knowledge. As it turned out, it’s a world completely different from anything I had known before.
Suddenly I found myself in a place where vehicles that looked like they had just escaped from a war movie set were driving around the beach and the surrounding area. Only instead of a camera operator, there were tourists with phones everywhere. Military cars, trucks, equipment dating back to the times when the word ‘multimedia’ meant, at best, a car radio. On top of that, the reenactment groups in uniform made you start wondering if you had really come to the Baltic Sea, or if you had accidentally taken a wrong turn and driven into a time machine.
Military Rest by the Baltic Sea
So, Darłówko once again showed me that there are many ways to relax by the Baltic. You can lie on the beach, you can go for a walk, you can dip your feet in the sea, and you can eat a fish that costs about the same as a loan installment. But you can also look at military vehicles and feel for a moment like a guy who has spent his whole life preparing for a massive military operation, only to eventually just go on vacation.
