Kashubia with Kids

Jarmark Wdzydzki is the biggest folk art and craft fair in Kashubia, spread through the historic buildings of Poland's oldest open-air museum.

Kids can watch old rural crafts being made and try some in workshops, join games and contests, and catch folk groups, village cabaret and theater. It suits families happy to wander outdoors for a few hours, and less so kids who need rides or screens to stay interested.

CEPR Szymbark is an open-air heritage park in Kashubia, best known for a house built upside down that visitors walk inside. The grounds also hold the world's largest piano, two Guinness-record longest boards, a Siberian house beside a model labor camp and train wagons, and a partisan bunker reached by a low tunnel, with air-raid sound effects. Kids also get a Kashubian fairy-tale land, bread baking and a playground.

A metal viewing tower named after John Paul II, built in 1997 on the summit of Wieżyca, at 328.6 meters the highest hill in Kashubia and Pomerania. The top sits inside a nature reserve of 150-year-old beech forest, and the platform rises above the treetops, with views over the Szymbark Hills and the lakes of the Kółko Raduńskie.

In winter, the southern slopes of the hill become a ski area.

Poland's first open-air museum, founded in 1906, spreads across 22 hectares on the shore of Gołuń lake. Kids walk between more than 50 wooden buildings moved here from Kashubia and Kociewie: cottages, manor houses, a village school, a smithy, windmills and an 18th-century church, many with furnished interiors.

From May to September, staff run hands-on workshops in old crafts such as spinning, weaving, grain milling and basket plaiting.

Three family parks sit side by side in a Kashubian village near Kartuzy. Park Miniatur has more than 70 scale models, a mini zoo, a funhouse and a Castle of Fear. Park Gigantów has giant insects, dinosaurs, a monster truck and a real passenger plane kids can board. Kaszubski Gracik lines up more than 80 full-size cars from films, cartoons and old Polish TV shows.