I'm back...quite a good trip but my polish host was not too well prepared and a bit obsessed with saving money so in the trip to the North I only got a private room in Krynica Morska that didn't even have its own bathroom instead of the 4-star hotel in Gdansk I was thinking about. Gdansk is excellent, but a lot more touristy than I would have thought (seems like quite a few Baltic cruisers pay a visit to it). There's a concentration camp in Sztutowo (around 40 km from Gdansk)...Not as impressive as Oswiecim, but still quite moving.
Stuff is still fairly cheap; the taxi driver preferred to take 20 PLN for the 26 PLN ride to the airport than give change from 100(!!!), and I brought back a year's supply of alcohol (10-12 bottles of all kinds of wodka and krupnik) that cost me just 300 PLN. But petrol is probably as expensive as in the UK and no Polish drinking/eating establishment could beat the 15 CZK I paid for 0.5L of beer in Plzen!