Minooka1145

Part of my family is Polish/Lithuanian and these have been on my To Visit list for a long time. My husband had suggested all 4 destinations (plus Helsinki AND St. Petersburg) but thankfully he's easy to sway particularly since we now only have 15 full days (not including travel back to London). We are renting a car so we have a lot of flexibility in adjusting our schedule as we need to. I've also read through all the posts and trip reports I can find and based on them and thinking it may be best to skip Latvia this round and maybe even skip Tallinn. I have heard so many great things about Estonia but I think it may be more about the natural beauty of driving through the country as opposed to any one destination and maybe saving both Estonia and Latvia for later may be the best option. Also based on the lukewarm reviews of Helsinki I've eliminated it from the list.

***Apologies in advance for what seems to be rambling and thinking aloud but I think I am!***

Based on what I've read here and on various sites I'm thinking of the following (loosely). My husband is working on the logistics of driving tonight; I'm really focused on days in places and sites to see further afield or en route to other places.

Krakow 4 full days including a full day trip to Auschwitz and Birkenau.
Warsaw 1 full day skipping the salt mines but wanting to see the Uprising Museum in particular
Gdansk 3 full days
Vilnius 4 full days including trips to Trakai and The Hill of Crosses

Since we are driving there are places we can stop on the drives.

We'd really like to find a way to work in 2 or 3 days (knowing we need to cut somewhere) for just R and R which is normally a beach portion of a trip but obviously not so much in this region at this time of year. Main requirement is a quiet location for just lazing around and maybe a bit of sightseeing in the AMs (my husband travels extensively for work and I've had my own stressful year). For this was thinking Zakopane. But I'm not sure I want to cut anything out based on the recs y'all have given for days to allocate.

Should we just cut out Warsaw completely? I'd really like to see the Museum but not sure it's worth eating into travel time. It seems we could drive there in the AM, see the Museum, spend a night and then drive on.

What about Wroclaw? Gets lots of love in Lonely Planet but I'm not finding much about it elsewhere.

Torun sounded really appealing as a stop and we could do en route to Gdansk.

I'd really like to see the Biatowieza National Park but that doesn't seem to be possible with the time we have.

I'm also feeling like I am short changing Lithuania but Vilnius seems to have a lot of history. With that said, my relatives were from outside Vilnius so maybe I've got blinders on and feel like that's where my heart is. Or that's just BS and I'm missing things ;-)