Today was cold for the season (high fifties). Today was cloudy. Today was windy, with fifteen-mph winds and gusts higher. But, importantly, today didn’t (mostly) rain.

That was a huge blessing. Even this morning when I checked, the morning was clear of rain, but there were supposed to be showers at noon and rain at 1:00. With the Ligo holiday today, most indoor things were closed, so a rainy day was going to be a challenge. Walking around a city, no matter how cute it is, in a cold, wind-driven rain isn’t any fun.

We returned the car to the airport with no issues. If it had been raining, we had talked about taking a cab. Since it wasn’t raining, and I had looked up how to get to the hotel using a bus, we decided to take the bus, which would be about four dollars instead of thirty dollars. And then we found out that with the holiday today, all public transportation was free all day. Meredith was most pleased.

And so we got to the hotel by about 10:30 and stowed our luggage in its storage. According to the forecast, we had about one hour of rain-free time, followed by showers, so I thought we could take a canal and river cruise that was leaving at noon. Since the boat would have cover, if it rained some, that would be okay. I had just set off toward where the boats were when I saw people at the nearby river-only boat. We crossed over to investigate and found out it was leaving at 11:30 a.m., and it was a little after 11:00. That worked for me, so we got on board and sat on the upper deck, which was protected by a roof but was open on the sides. The wind was chilly on the river, so we were happy to have the boat folks supply us with blankets here at the end of June.

The river cruise itself was pleasant. We got to see both sides of the Daugava River, including the very cool-looking, sort of triangular National Library, as well as the taller buildings of the Old Town on the other side of the river (and there are a TON of steeples in the Old Town). We had about three minutes of spitting rain, but Mer and I just scooted back from the edge of the boat to get more under the roof canopy. We came off the boat a bit cold, but dry.

After swinging by the hotel storage room to dig out more clothes, we walked into the Old Town. It still wasn’t raining at 1:00, so we were going to take advantage of the weather. We started with the wonderfully spired St. Peter’s. It’s a brick church with a three-tier steeple, and you can take an elevator up to the first steeple tier. We got into the church simultaneously with a large tour group, so we headed right to the elevator to go up, figuring the group would come along before too long. It was a good choice; we got right on the elevator when it opened, and went up. We were greeted by strong winds and spitting rain, but really great views of the city. Sadly, between the weather and my fear of heights, I didn’t stay too long, even taking the last spot on the elevator and leaving Mer (with her blessing) to get down as soon as I could. Meredith appreciated the extra time on the top because she loved it up there, and while I was waiting for her, the tour group came up the stairs and filled the lobby area. I had to look for Mer’s hat when the doors opened because of all the people in the way.

We looked around the main level of the church, and it had two abstract sculptures of Jesus on one side of the church. One was a very rough sculpture of Jesus carrying his cross, and the other was Jesus on the cross, but in such a way that part of his body was under some swirling obstructions (wind? fire?) which gave the appearance of Jesus ascending as well. Both works were great.

The altar was also unusual – it was a huge but harmoniously carved wooden altar. St. Peter’s is a very vertical church, and so the altar reaches high into the church. Jesus on the cross is the main figure, but there are smaller figures of saints around the base of the altar, in a more subtle way. We sat down and enjoyed looking at the altar for several minutes.

When we got out of the church, there still was no rain, so I wandered. Riga’s Old Town is a gem of a place to wander. I just kept taking whatever street looked interesting to me. We accidently found the side view of St. Peter’s, and we stumbled upon St. John’s, which was open. We went in and were greeted by acoustically lively organ music (recorded). The church was also unusual in that the vaulting of the ceiling was all painted red, grey, white, and black. It was beautiful (the picture doesn’t do it full justice).

We roamed around the Old Town some more, taking in the wonderful building colors and elaborate fronts of buildings. I had been determined to push on until it rained, but I was no longer sure it was going to rain, and we were both getting hungry. So we took a touristic chance on the weather and ate at a traditional Latvian restaurant. When we came out a little after 3:00, we still had no rain. I decided we should check in to the hotel and use the opportunity to get some more water and to use wifi to check on the weather.

The weather forecast showed some showers in the area, but the real rain was holding off until about 6:00. I decided to go to the nearby TI office and get a map and use that to make my aimless wanderings more aimful but still just wanderings. I saw a ring of parks around the enormous Freedom Monument, and we like parks, so that was our direction. The town sign near the monument, as well as the one in the town hall square, both have characters from the recent Best Animated Film winner, the Latvian film Flow. The movie focuses on a cat and some other animals the cat meets when a flood comes. There are no words in the film, and it is excellent, but really tense for me since I can’t stand seeing cats in peril, even pretend peril. At any rate, Riga has embraced the movie’s characters on the signs.

After the impressive Freedom Monument, I saw a tree-lined walking path going down the street, so we took that to the gorgeous white-and-red-brick Orthodox cathedral of Riga. It was open, so we went in to see the church and found an evening service going on. My limited understanding of Orthodox services is that the priest says and does most things, and most of those things happen behind a screen that separates the congregation from the holy place. So even though there was a service on, respectful tourists were still welcome. We walked into a little slice of heaven as a boys’ choir (or women’s choir – we weren’t sure which, since we couldn’t see the singers) was singing and filling that enormous space with beauty. We stood (people stand for Orthodox services) for about fifteen minutes listening to the singing and the priest intoning things. It was a happy chance experience.

After the church, we walked through a park to look at an artificial tree with birdhouses covering it. Each birdhouse had a wire to it, so we think (and hope) it lights up at night. But since night here is currently from 11:30 p.m. to 3:30 a.m., we’re not going to find out firsthand.

We walked back to the first park near the Freedom Monument and explored the paths of the park. There was the boat canal I had set out for earlier, and tons of flowers, and an elaborate artificial stream that kept going under the paths and fed multiple pools and waterfalls. We chanced upon the national opera house, which seems to be doing a dozen or so one-night-only productions of major operas during “opera month.” That’s an undertaking.

During our hike, it had showered a couple of times, but nothing too heavy. Around 6:00, it started to rain steadily, so we headed back to the hotel. As we got close, the rain stopped. Ah, well. We had already gotten in six or more hours of touring that I hadn’t expected to be able to do. It was a fine day in Riga.

Ligo is Latvia’s almost-summer-solstice celebration that is held over June 23rd and June 24th. It celebrates summer with women wearing flower wreaths on their heads and men wearing green-leaf wreaths. Many cars are decorated with greenery as well, including some on twenty-something-year-old guys’ cars. One hotel receptionist told us that Ligo “is a bigger holiday in Latvia than even Christmas.” It’s kind of a big deal here.

As such, I didn’t hold out much hope for tourism stuff today. I had confirmed that the cat-themed restaurant/bakery was open until 6:00 pm, so I knew we wouldn’t go hungry, but I wasn’t sure how much other stuff would be open. My initial checks showed that the major cultural stuff was all closed, but then I checked the tourist-amusement stuff, and that was the jackpot. Several things were open on shortened hours. The day was set around what was open.

Since it was a major holiday and I wasn’t expecting too much to be going on, I let us sleep in this morning. Add in going to get breakfast at the cat cafe and coming back to the room to put tomorrow’s breakfast in the refrigerator, and we didn’t get going for the day until 11:30. But we had places to go!

The first place that was still open was a cable car across the valley. Latvia is fairly flat (the highest point in Latvia is about a thousand feet). But it does have a pretty major valley here in the national park with the Gauja River running through it.  And that river has a couple of bridges over it in the valley, but for elevation-resistant hikers and tourists, there’s a cable car across the valley. Each way takes about seven minutes. Since very few things were open, and today was a national holiday, the first car we could get on was a little over an hour out, at 12:40. So we took that as an opportunity to walk toward the other open tourist trap – Tarzan Park.

Tarzan Park is an “adventure park” with things to do for the kids, but also had yet another alpine slide in this flat country, along with a chair lift to get you back up out of the valley. We were going to check that out, but I got distracted by a hiking trail that had a viewpoint symbol at the top of the trail. At the top. As in it went down. All the way to the river, as it turned out. I somehow missed the twenty-seven-percent-grade symbol that was posted there (stairs have a grade between thirty and fifty percent, so imagine a three-thousand-foot-long staircase, and you get the idea). At least it was paved with bricks, and it was a pretty day. Still, my wife really clearly loves me. There were some grand views across the river, but the best views for the trail were actually down at the riverside.

By the time we got back up to the top and got back to the cable car, we only had twenty minutes to wait, so we used the restroom and looked out over the valley. The actual cable car ride was very pleasant. You could see a huge manor house, and you could see two castles, including Turaida Castle (where we were a couple of days ago). The ride over takes seven minutes, and the car runs every twenty minutes, but I had nothing particular to do on the other side, so we came right back on the same car. We had to get to Tarzan’s.

We walked back over to the park and got tickets to go down. Usually with alpine slides, Mer and I do a scenic run and a speed run. We thought that that would be the case here, but the track had other ideas. The track weaves in and out of trees, so there isn’t much to see for a scenic ride. Plus, the thing is so darn kicky that you need to pay attention to the track. It is really fast, and the corners are sharp and not terribly smooth. It jerks you around quite a bit. So the speed run of letting the slide go full-out really didn’t happen either. It was still a great ride, and we did it twice. As a bonus, we got to ride up the very peaceful chairlift, which goes over sections of the slide track, so we could see others zooming down the hill.

Having finished our third downhill ride outing of this trip, we got back in the car and drove over to Sigulda’s new castle, which is conveniently next to the old castle. The new castle is set in a pretty, enclosed, small park and we checked that out. The castle was closed today, but you could still go on the balconies, which had great views across the valley and good views of the old castle. The old castle was just open today – no entry fee. There were workers in the castle area setting up for the town’s Ligo celebration (including an eight-foot-high woodpile for a bonfire that I’m not going to leap over, no matter how much luck I’d receive), so I guess they must have just figured to let anyone in. So we went in to check it out.

The old castle was partly restored in the twentieth century, but that seemed limited to the front wall and tower of the castle. There are no intact rooms, and really only the front and part of one interior wall are standing (and a small tower at the back that was closed). But the castle did have great views of the manor over the valley on one side of the castle and Turaida Castle on the other. We were very pleased to have seen it.

We left the castle and went the short distance over to the town’s Lutheran church. The steeple was oddly large for the church, and we had noticed that style in Lithuania two years ago. Happily, the church was open (in your face, pagan ritual holiday!), so we went in. The inside was painted to look sort of like colorful marble, and the effect worked really well. The church looked as if it could easily hold a couple of hundred people, and the decorations were mainly limited to the altar area, with a large painting of Jesus praying, looking up to heaven. The choir/organ area was open, so we went up there as well, and there was a display of about a dozen nature “paintings” made of colorful shirt buttons. It sounds odd, but it worked quite well in an impressionist way – if you stood back a bit, you could easily see the flowers or trees or the like.

By now it was getting close to 4:00 and was starting to rain, and I didn’t want to risk missing a chance to eat, so we went back to the car, preparing to find some food and to wait out the rain. The first two places we tried were closed, and the third place was mobbed with people, so we just went back to the cat cafe and had a very good meal for fairly cheap. Always trust the restaurant with a resident cat.

Since it was still raining fairly hard when we finished, we went back to the room for thirty or forty minutes. Mer read, and I tried to find things to do in Riga tomorrow when it’s going to rain AND almost everything is going to be closed. The rain stopped, so we headed back out to go hiking. I really wanted to see Paradise Hill.

On the map, you could park near Paradise Hill and walk to it. Or you could park some distance away and walk a trail to it, seeing several sights along the way (caves, an old castle hill, etc.). I elected to do that to extend the hike on this fine evening.

We set off with our town-provided map in hand. It didn’t show every detail of the trail, but had certain sights marked on it, so I could just look for signs to the sights. Except when the signs to a particular sight weren’t posted on every signpost. Or when one of the sights shared the same name as other sights except for a minor second word. We found a very pretty small sandstone canyon, but that was a dead end we had sidetracked to deliberately. On our hike to Paradise Hill, we went down approximately 3.7 million wet, slanted, and sometimes mud-covered wooden steps. We had to cross three downed trees across the trail. We saw a pretty stream and followed it along until we started to go back up out of the valley, which was a great sign for an upcoming hill. Until it wasn’t. As we emerged from the trail into a meadow about forty-five minutes later, Meredith declared, “There’s the haystack we saw earlier.” We had somehow completed a loop without my knowing it from my map.

We drove over to the Paradise Hill parking lot.

From there, the trail to Paradise Hill was wide and flat and in excellent condition. In ten minutes, we were at a large viewpoint that had wonderful views of the river valley and of Turaida Castle. There was even a two-person swing. We lingered there about twenty minutes enjoying the birdsongs and the cool evening. It was worth figuring out how to get there.

After leaving Paradise Hill, we went back to the car and went home. Tomorrow we have to leave early to return the car before we spend our last three Latvian days in Riga. I need to get to work on finding tourist trap things that might open late tomorrow.

Today was a very odd day. Getting breakfast was odd. The weather was odd. Our GPS was odd, and then when we checked the phone maps, the phone was odd. Following signs to the first sight was odd, and the first sight itself was odd in many ways.  Today was a very odd day.

Our hotel doesn’t have breakfast included, so we headed off to the cat-themed restaurant from last night, which has an attached bakery. We wanted to save time from the twenty-minute walk, so we drove. But the road near the bakery is all torn up, so we couldn’t turn onto the street, so we parked in a nearby lot and walked the seven or eight minutes to the bakery. Total transit time, about fifteen minutes. We ordered some excellent food to take back to the room and walked back to the car. In an ever increasing rain, on a day when to forecast called for no rain. Clouds/rain/sun/clouds/rain/sun was a pattern for most of the day. The GPS took us back a roundabout way, so the return trip was about seventeen minutes total, but at least we didn’t get soaked in the pouring not-raining.

After breakfast, Mer wanted to head to the small village of Ligatne and found the site she was looking for in my GPS. It told us the twenty-minute drive was going to take fifty minutes, but that included going down some dirt roads, and my GPS really hates estimating dirt road time. We followed it from the main road to a country road to a back road to a dirt road to a small dirt road to a tractor path, and I finally stopped when I saw a “Do not enter” sign with no explanation. We checked the phone, and it agreed I should keep going.

I did not.

We programmed the GPS for the town of Ligatne itself, and Meredith figured we could follow signs. We got to Ligatne, and while Mer was checking a sign, I accidently bumped the GPS to go back to our hotel. It showed we could get there in… 20 minutes. Stupid dirt road.

Mer found a sign she wanted. She said it was a slightly different name, but it was what she was looking for. It turns out she was quite wrong, but it worked out. Off we went, following some signs (they got a bit sparse in places), and arrived at two large buildings at the end of a very minor dirt road. One was clearly an apartment building. The other looked to be under construction and had no signs on it. As we were trying to figure things out, two normal-looking men without hardhats came out of the under-construction building, and we saw a woman in a wheelchair sitting next to the door. Mer said she had thought it was a government-assisted living center for the elderly, but we might as well see what was inside the unmarked building.

It turns out the unmarked building was a health and wellness hotel AND sat above a sight I wanted to see – a secret Soviet bunker. Again, no signs anywhere. I guess that’s how secret the bunker is.

Meredith had come to see a trail system that had animals in woodland enclosures along the trail. We got a trail map from a woman who was channeling old-school Eastern European customer service (maybe she was having a bad day), and we made a noon reservation for an English tour of the bunker (it was 10:30 at the time). Off we went.

We hiked around the back of the wellness hotel, and it became clear why the facelift on the front was happening. The back was classic sixties Soviet concrete architecture. We were so distracted by the building that we missed a turn and kept going on a smaller trail. It took us past the apartment block and a very creepy, overgrown, abandoned seventies playground. We wound up into the woods, but I kept trying to use the map Mer picked up, so I kept us curving around the hotel complex, which involved some scrambling down some steep parts of the trail. We knew we should hit the Gauja River, so anytime we saw water, we followed it downstream. Eventually, we came out on a large trail that led to a beautiful, wide pool of the river which reflected sand cliffs. It was lovely. It also helped us find where we were on the map, which helped us get back to the right trail.

Which was an exercise trail. Every hundred yards or so was a sign telling us to do exercises. There were no animals in sight anywhere, in pens or otherwise. We finished up the exercise trail without actually doing any of the exercises, and we had time to check out the second trail, one showing off Latvian mythology. There were carvings of fantastic creatures every now and then along the trail, and toward the end, we actually encountered other people for the first time in over an hour. We finished up our hike and headed into the super secret wellness hotel to wait for our tour.

There was a Latvian tour that went first, and then a Russian tour, and finally, we got to go. There were five of us Americans and six Germans. Our guide was a fantastic, theatrical, over-the-top man who may be my favorite guide ever. He played up the role of being a Soviet Communist, throwing himself into everything. He picked people out of the group to be members of the party, such as a major in the KGB who had to issue a summary of the Twentieth Soviet Congress, and Meredith got to be picked as Madame Secretary of the Latvian Communist Party, which gave her the only private office and bedroom in the bunker. Meredith was escorted by our guide down the hallway as he shouted in Russian to make way for Madame Secretary. It was great fun.

We learned that the bunker could house 250 (important) people for three months, during which it needed no help from the outside. Communication equipment was deliberately outdated so as to be easy to repair by those in the bunker. The air could be drawn from outside, but could also be created by the same system the Soviets used for diesel submarines. Offices and beds and cafeteria space were used in shifts since there weren’t enough to go around for everyone (except Madame Secretary Meredith, of course). The bunker was deemed necessary after the Cuban Missile Crisis, and it took twenty years to build at the rough cost of twenty billion dollars  in today’s money. We also learned that it was expected that school children could get a gas mask out of a storage bag, screw on the charcoal cylinder, and have it on over their faces within seven seconds. Also, there were enough gas masks in circulation to protect about ninety-five percent of the civilian population.

We had a great time, and as a bonus, we got to eat in the bunker cafeteria, which is original (as is all the bunker) to the 1980s. We were served dumplings, and that actually served as Mer’s and my lunch for today. Well timed.

We found out later, back in the room, that the site that Meredith was actually looking for was five miles away from the bunker. But it worked out well, as we would have missed the bunker tour if we had done the other sight first.

From the bunker, we drove to the very cute little town of Cesis. Mer wanted to see if the new and old castles (side by side) were open. They were not, as it’s Sunday today and the next two days are the Ligo summer celebration, which is a huge deal in Latvia. One Latvian told us it is more important as a holiday than even Christmas. Pretty much everything shuts down (which should make touring over the next two days interesting), and so it was with the castles. But we got to pet a kitty curled up on a bench next to the castle, and the castle center had a sign on it saying (in English), “Do not let the cat in.” Good kitty.

We popped into the tourist information center to pick up a map of the town, and the woman working there also gave us a walking tour map. We like focused touring, so that was great. The old town is easy to walk around in, and we took advantage of that. We did have to keep putting layers on and off and sunglasses on and off as the weather changed every fifteen minutes or so, but it was a great walk.

The walk gave us many views of the old castle and took us down past a pretty pond in a park that was still cleaning up tents from a weekend festival. We found out later it was an “ideas festival” where various groups (politicians, university professors, military, etc.) come to have conversations with ordinary people. It sounded pretty great.

The walk took us up to a hill overlooking the park and then down and back up again to yet another very colorful Orthodox church. From there we found a small square and we saw that the Lutheran church was open, so we went in,

We were informed we could climb the bell tower (101 steps) for six euros, so we bought tickets for that. We looked around the church, which was simple but solemn, and then we climbed the tower. It was split into various landings, and on each level was an exhibit. One was on how the church looked in every century from the 15th century and on. One was on a time capsule they found from around 1850 that was placed in the steeple (the current church congregation put their own time capsule in the steeple for future renovators). My favorite level was one of an artist who had drawn very simple drawings and watercolors based on sermons she’d heard. They were beautiful and effective (and in Latvian, which made the scripture references hard to read).

As per normal, Meredith loved the views from the tower, and I was nervous. I added to that the concern the bell might ring (there were warnings that hearing damage could result). We stayed there long enough for Meredith to see out all eight windows and went back down. The bell didn’t ring.

On the way out, I mentioned to the young man at the desk how much I loved the art, and he pointed out that I could by postcards of some of the works, so I did. I saw he was reading in his (Latvian) Bible, so we started chatting. He has several friends in the US, and he collects different English translations of the Bible to compare to his Latvian one. He was the one who told us about the ideas festival, and we had fun chatting for about fifteen minutes.

We continued our walk, which took us to the main square of the town and Town Hall, before we headed into another small park with a pond and beautiful flowers. Here Mer and I finally got to try a see-saw that also rotates 360 degrees; we had seen ones in other parks. They are fun, if a little hard to get on and off of. The walk finished off back at the castle.

We decided to go home because the local Sigulda bobsleigh track was open for touring until 8:00, although the wheeled sled that you can take down the track stopped running at 5:00. Unfortunately, as we got just a little over three miles from our hotel on the major road, traffic came to a stop. After forty minutes of only going three tenths of a mile, I did a U-turn, and we went back to Ligatne for supper. It seemed much better than sitting unmoving in traffic; plus, we needed to use the bathroom.

Supper was lovely on a enclosed porch. The sun had finally come out to stay, and after supper, we walked some, going up a hill that overlooked the town, and then exploring along the fronts of caves locals had carved into the sandstone cliff in order to have cool food storage. We stopped at a couple of different overlooks for the fairly rain-full small river gushing along in front of the cliff, and then we came home.

So not too much went to plan today, and we have some tourism challenges coming up with the two-day holiday and some rain moving in. But today turned out well, so we have every reason to think we’ll still have a good time.

Today we got the trifecta of Riordan tourism – Turaida Museum Reserve near the town of Sigulda. Turaida has a castle AND an open-air museum AND a sculpture park, all on one site, and all for a low price of about ten dollars. Except, of course, that I’m a student, so I got in for about five dollars. I’ve now gotten a student rate at four sites. My education is clearly paying for itself.

We got to the museum/park about 11:30, along with a tour bus to join the other half-dozen tour buses already there. Turaida is the most-visited site in Latvia, so no surprise there. But what amazes dedicated tourists like us is that when we went by the lot to go get lunch at 2:00, all the buses were gone. I guess two hours at a fifty-five-acre site with a dozen buildings, a castle, and a sculpture garden with twenty-six sculptures is way more than enough. Not so for us.

We figured that the tour groups would head to the castle, so Meredith steered us onto the walking/hiking paths on the other side of the park. We met no one on the meadow trail, and we only met one group of young and middle-aged Latvians coming out of the woods when we were going into the woods trail. Otherwise, we had it to ourselves. The woods trail was especially pretty – dense woods and tall trees with the trail winding around them. We also had several signs along the trail telling us (in a very light version) about the culture of the ancient Liv people of the area. Most things were pretty basic (“The woods were important for fuel and food…”), but we found out that the bird is an important symbol to the Livs because it was somehow involved in creation. We also found out that if we washed our faces in a cold spring that was just a trickle though the mud, we would become beautiful. Neither of us cared about impressing the other enough to kneel in the mud.

The woods trail dumped us out into the middle of the main part of the sculpture garden. I love outdoor sculpture, so this was a big hit for me. Just like in Kuldiga, this park was the work of just one artist (not the same one as in Kuldiga). That is very interesting to me as it helps you to see the artist’s style. This artist was more abstract than the Kuldiga one, but still mainly focused on the human form (or forms for more than one person). To my untrained eye, the style was again a more humanized form of the “heroic figure” style of art I usually associate with the Soviets. Probably our favorite was Mother and Daughter, which somehow, with just hints of features, conveyed a young and lovely woman on one side and an older woman on the other. The figures were obvious to both of us even though the sculpture wasn’t literal in form.

We made our way along the path of the garden back to the welcome center area and the open-air museum found there. We had already seen an open-air museum in Ventspils consisting mainly of fishermen’s homes and buildings. This one was different from that one (and from all others that I’ve seen) in that they were all buildings left in place from when the grounds of the museum were still a manor. (I never learned whose manor it was or what happened to the manor house). So these buildings were all unified in the purpose of supporting the manor.

Not exhaustively, there were a stable and a carriage house, and a “bath house” that was really a sauna and which was used for healing the sick, delivering babies, drying meats, and so on. There was a huge building where the hired hands slept during the week (they worked Monday noon to Saturday noon before going home). There were a fish storage building and a couple of homes for craftsmen on the manor. There was a house for the governor of the estate, and a church.

While we didn’t have even close to enough time to read and watch everything, some things I remember were:
– The serfs were freed in 1817, but still had restricted movement for about twelve years.
– Many of the ex-serfs became hired hands on the estates they had been on, and the lord of the estate could still do pretty much what he wanted to do, including whipping them.
– Agricultural reform around 1900 broke up a lot of the manors and gave the land to peasant farmers.
– The Latvian war for independence seemed to be against Bolsheviks, with whom they shared many beliefs, except that the Bolsheviks refused to want Latvian independence.
– Latvia won the war for independence against great odds. It took two years, and the independence lasted until 1945, when the Soviets took over.
– The castle on the hill was started in the 1200s, like most good castles.
– The castle was largely abandoned after a huge 1776 fire burned all non-stone structures.
– The castle changed hands several times as the German Teutonic knights fought Riga’s archbishop over the control of much of Latvia. The power struggle seems to have caused that version of Latvia to collapse.
– The castle was restored in the twentieth century.

After lunch we headed up to the castle itself. The main tower had been fully restored, and so we climbed that. Mer loved the views while I sat comfortably on a bench in the safe middle of the platform. We explored the ruined parts of the castle as well as the other restored parts – the south and east walls and buildings. They housed exhibits on what life was like at the castle, and some history of the archbishop fighting the the knights.

While we had had a wonderful weather day for most of our time, it did rain some while we were at the castle (around 5:00). We avoided the worst of it by looking at the things in the inside rooms of the castle. We finished our tour of the museum land by looking at the three or four buildings we hadn’t yet seen. And so we managed to cover the museum in about six hours, finishing up a little before 6:00.

We drove back the short distance to the hotel and checked in, and then walked out into town for supper. It was still misting when we started, but the rain finally stopped for the day as we were on the way. We ended up at a cat-themed restaurant that had a resident kitty. I was tickled (and the kitty got some scratching love from me).

After supper we were going to wander the town a bit, but everything is spread out more than it looked on the map. We headed home since we have two more days here. We can try more things tomorrow.

When we plan these European trips, Mer and I split the days of one of us being in charge. For this trip, that meant I got to plan six days. As I sifted though my options, I came down to one free day (today), but I had a problem: I wanted to see Latvia’s “Versailles” (Rundale Palace) AND I wanted to see the tourist beach town that is next to Riga (Jurmala). After much consideration, I decided on doing both. I would drive from Kuldiga to Rundale (2.5 hours) and see the palace. We’d then drive on to Jurmala (1.25 hours) and spend the night there. I knew that this would shortchange both sites somewhat, but I wanted to see them both.

It worked out quite well, overall. The drive to Rundale went well except that in the last ten minutes, we drove into light rain. Since we had come from the west, I figured it would all blow over, especially in the twenty-mph winds. Besides, we could tour the inside of the palace to start with and then do the extensive garden.

What a place. I think that most large palaces claim to be “the Versailles of *****”, but Rundale can definitely be mentioned in the same breath. It has all the pomp and luxury of Versailles, but is a smaller structure (Versailles has over 2000 rooms while Rundale has 138). I actually liked many of Rundale’s rooms more than the ones at Versailles – they suited my taste somehow. I’m picky in palaces.

The palace was built between 1736 and 1740 by Ernst Johann von Biron, the Duke of Courland. He seems to have won favor with a Russian princess who unexpectedly became the empress and favored von Biron. Needless to say, when the old Duke of Courland died, von Biron got the post. As part of his own anticipation of becoming successful and wealthy, he built Rundale as a summer home and hunting retreat. The palace was expanded and redecorated from 1764 to 1768. When the empress died, von Biron was accused of skimming off the Russian treasury and sentenced to death, a sentence which was commuted to exile, but he was able to come back in 1763 under Catherine the Great.

The house and the gardens were both designed by the same Italian architect, so they are very harmonious together. From beginning to end of the building of the house and gardens, very little was changed from the original plans.

The gardens were kept up all the way until World War I, when they fell into disrepair. The house was used as a school at that time. A limited restoration of the gardens happened in the 1930s, but the house restoration didn’t start until 1964, and the restoration (as much as has been done) took fifty years. By now, 45 of the 138 rooms are fully restored, along with the outside of the palace and the gardens.

We toured the rooms that are open, and they are opulent. We saw some pictures of rooms before restoration, and would like to give a huge shout-out of thanks to the skill of the restorers. They did an incredible job.

For me, while the duke’s bedroom and the duchess’s bedroom were both striking, my favorite rooms were the two (yes, two) ballrooms. They were large and elegant spaces, and both elicited a “wow” from me as I entered.

It took us ninety minutes to tour the house, and that was without our using an audio guide or stopping to read the information in the rooms. We had a light lunch in the cafe and headed out into the gardens, where we finally got a chance to do some butt-sitting tourism. “Butt-sitting tourism” for us is what it sounds like – getting to do a tour of somewhere while sitting down. In this case, we got to ride on a small tourist train (with just the two of us) while it went around the garden. We got to listen to a running commentary on the gardens as we went, so I know that the garden has over two thousand varieties of roses in it. It was also designed to be seen from above, centered on the second-floor bedroom of the duke. The garden has five major “arms,” or large paths, that radiate through it, with many secondary paths. We wound through many of them. It was a fun little tour, but Meredith was glad the tourist train provided a blanket on the last day of spring (it was a little cool).

After the tour, we walked around the garden on our own. We liked the “blue garden,” which was actually made up of mostly purple flowers. We stumbled on the outdoor amphitheater that can seat six hundred people. And we walked the circular maze at the back end of the garden (a footpath maze, not a hedge maze).

By then it was almost 3:30, so we dashed quickly through an exhibit on decorative art, covering the 1400s to the early 1900s. By 4:00 I felt we should leave if we were going to see anything in Jurmala.

We got to Jurmala about 6:00 and got settled in our room, and I decided we should eat on the pedestrian street in town, Jomas Iela (street). To get there, we walked two hundred yards over a forested dune to the largely empty beach. It was in the mid-fifties, and the wind was blowing over the sea, and there were choppy waves crashing on the beach. We saw one swimmer. We walked past a lady who was wearing a winter coat in front of the “Summertime Cafe” on the last day of spring. That made me smile.

The beach walk was pleasant, if a little cool, and got us close to downtown. Even walking away from the beach here is fun because many of the houses are elegant and pretty to look at. When we got the the pedestrian street, we were surprised it was framed at one end by a wildly colorful Orthodox church. The rest of the street was mostly lined with shops and restaurants. We ate at an Italian pizza place, and had ice cream down the street a bit, where we ran into two American women. One works in Latvia (she didn’t say what she did), and her friend was visiting and then heading on to Florence, Italy.

We started home after ice cream, making a detour down the main street leading to the beach. I wanted to see what the main beach access looked like. It had a concert venue next to it with a pop concert going on, and a lit-up dancing fountain in the street itself. When we got to the beach, the wind hadn’t died down, so we got some sand kicked up in our faces.

The walk home took about thirty minutes, but I loved looking at all the houses and the many mature trees, all with the distant sound of waves. It was a fun walk. I could easily spend another day here tomorrow to explore, but Meredith takes over the next two days. I’m glad I decided to squeeze both sites in today. It was worth the extra driving.

Sometimes you step up to the touristic plate swinging for a homerun. And then you realize you’re facing the Latvian national team and their fearsome pitcher. First, he throws a mean curveball of weather at you. Then his screwball of “no factory tours” is unhittable. Finally he rams a fastball of renovation right down the plate. It makes for a long game.

We always check the weather when we travel to see what we need to wear and if we need umbrellas and that sort of thing. This morning, Kuldiga was supposed to have strong thunderstorms with frequent lightning and heavy downpours from about 10:00 to about 1:00, with some rain after that until 4:00. Not great, but we could do some inside things. It was mostly sunny when we set off, so I decided to do my far-flung option first.

Not too far away from the old town is the Kalku Street Quarter. It’s an old industrial area that now houses a brewery, a gym, and some shops. We walked there, but with a bit of difficulty resulting from my inability to read any sign in Latvian. Meredith finds this fascinating. She points out that the sign says, “Blahblah,” and that we are looking for “Blahblah.” What I see is the immediately forgettable “Blqxzwyh” and so never bother with signs.

At any rate, we were there to see the very cool-sounding Klavins Piano Workshop. Davids Klavins founded the company to design new acoustic pianos, and he came up with what I describe as two-story vertical grand pianos. The player sits on a platform near the top of the piano and the soundboard extends some ten feet or more below the player. I found a clip online, and the piano sounded very sweet and responsive. And the factory had signs on the door saying, “This is a working factory! No guests!” So much for my tourist map telling me to go “listen to fantastic stories of experiences from piano master Davids….” You should still look up Klavins Piano clips – they are something to see.

We walked back into the old town to the Town Garden park, where we had seen sculptures yesterday. We toured the whole park today. There are twenty-two sculptures of people in the park, all done by the same woman artist. She worked from roughly 1950 to 1990, so mostly under the Soviets, and yet her work is more human and tender than art I usually associate with heroic-style art produced under Communism. Some of her art showing women in national dress singing together (a national tradition) struck us as dangerous to create during Soviet rule. We’re not sure when the works went on display, so maybe they were after Latvia gained its independence. At any rate, we really liked the sculptures. And the park had pretty flowers, a boardwalk, and a fountain in it, so it checked a lot of our park boxes. We really liked it. Since we were close, we went to a viewing area for the river’s falls and sat there for a few minutes.

From the park, we went to the Living Museum (or the Live Museum, depending on which source you ask). It’s a small history-of-Kuldiga museum with animatronic and video displays. It was also locked at 11:50 when it supposedly opened at 11:00. Mer helpfully interpreted a sign as saying it would open at noon. It had just started raining lightly but steadily, so I thought we would wait for the museum. The rain lightened (starting a pattern of no rain/light rain/steady rain/no rain), and I thought we could be more entertained over next to the TI (tourist information office) by watching the dancing fountain there. The TI was just around the corner, so we went and watched the fountain until 12:05.

We went back to the museum. The door was locked.

We went back to the TI and went in. The woman at the desk confirmed that the museum should be open.

We went back to the museum. The door was locked. I called the number on the sign. After “Hello?” we got cut off.

We went back to the TI. I asked the woman to call, which she did. It was a fairly long conversation. At the end of it, she told us the museum was open and she didn’t know why we couldn’t get in.

We went back to the museum. There was a young woman in street clothes standing in the door. She offered some kind of apology that I didn’t quite catch and she got us our tickets. It seems as if the “live” part of the Live Museum is the live guide, who was the young woman. She asked us to take as seat in a dimly lit room and told us to wait a minute so our eyes would adjust. She came back a couple of minutes later wearing a medieval-style robe and not her street clothes, so it seems likely that our eyes adjusting took the same amount of time for her to change.

Still, she was lively and funny. She took us through several rooms that sort-of kind-of told some of the history of the town using props, animatronics, and film projections. Imagine a small-scale Disney doing light history. We started in the punishment room, where we saw how people were punished in town back in the day. There was a pillory, of course, but there was also a metal-bar box for anyone deemed lazy. The box was too small to stand up in, and would have been tight to sit in. The authorities would put the lazy person in the box for forty-eight hours with no food, water, or shelter. Lastly, they had a dummy display of hanging, which could be quick (immediate death) or slow (four-plus hours) depending on how it was done.

We then moved into a room of the Baron Jacob Kettler, who helped make the Grand Duchy of Courland (this part of Latvia) rich and powerful by building lots of high-quality ships. The English and French ordered Courland ships, and the Baron used his own ships for trade. He made settlements in Gambia and Tobago, and he used the settlements to trade amber and grains with Africa, slaves to Tobago, and tobacco and coffee and cacao to Courland. It brought in a bunch of money to the town and area. The Baron is celebrated still in several displays around town, but the locals tend to gloss over the slave-trade part.

From the Baron’s room, we boarded a ship (it really rocked on the waves) to Tobago as settlers, with fifty percent of us dying along the way. None of us ever came back to Courland.

Next was a room with a skeletal figure who jumped at us. He represented famine. After the Baron’s death, the ruling family moved their government to another town and built another castle there. Kuldiga lost most of its income, and famine resulted.

The next room had a wrapped-up dead body in it. The woman had died of the plague. The plague came late to Latvia in 1710, but it ended up killing ninety percent of the town. The adjacent room had plague victims locked in the church with their hands out toward us (this part is solidly a legend with no documentation). The last room was Kuldiga of today, with a picture of the Baron and a picture of a hundred-year-old local sculptor who also was an actor and translated French films into Latvian. That was the statue of the man Meredith sat next to yesterday, and local legend says that since she sat and had tea with him, she will now live to be a hundred too.

And that was the museum. It took maybe thirty minutes, and was a good amount of touristy fun.

We headed up the road to go to another sight, but since we were passing an old house that had the largest mantel chimney in Latvia in it, we stepped inside (it was free). We poked around the place and couldn’t find a mantel or chimney. Then I found a closed door that opened into a dim room with a large step down, so I went in. I still couldn’t see a mantel or chimney, and then I looked up. I was standing in the enormous chimney. There was no mantel – I don’t know why it was called that, but it seems as if the idea was to heat the stones in the huge chimney, and the stones heated the rest of the building. It’s not efficient, which is why most are gone, but this one was impressively large.

On to our next sight! We went to Visumnica (“Universe”). I wasn’t sure what it was, but the tourist map made it sound like optical illusions or mirror tricks or the like. It was mirror fun. Mer and I got to go through by ourselves. We started with a small mirrored room that had a light and sound show for three minutes with infinite-seeming lights in every direction. We got to do that one twice (maybe the day was slow?). There was a room with a lit-up plant sculpture reflected in slowly moving mirrors that made it hard to figure out where to go. I may have walked into a mirror. That was followed by dangling fiber optic strands between mirrors, and a vertical rope tunnel you stood in and had mirrors top and bottom. It gave the feel of a sci-fi time-travel tunnel. There was another small infinite-distance mirror trick, and a room where wall-sized mirrors slowly moved to make it feel as if the whole room were moving. As we have seen in illusion museums before, Meredith finds these fun and stands there enjoying them. I find them interesting but spend the whole time fighting my body as it leans against the tilt of the room even though there is no movement.

It was now 1:30, and we hadn’t really been rained on. We were in the clear! We stopped at a bakery and got lunch, and then headed back to the room to check the weather and top up water so we could go on a hike next to the river. The forecast said the rain was done, although the radar showed some clouds over the Baltic Sea that worried me some. Still, we were good. We dropped the umbrellas and went to go to the hike.

We got about four blocks when it started to sprinkle.

No worries! I wanted to see the inside of the Catholic church in town, which is supposed to be lavishly decorated inside. We could wait out the obviously passing storm in there. It was a bit tricky finding the church since it was surrounded on three sides by other buildings, but we made it!

It was closed for renovation.

No worries! I wanted to see the inside of the old Lutheran church. We got close to there as it started to rain harder, but the church was open, so we were in luck. The church had almost no decorations, but that may be because it was used as a warehouse and horse stable under the Soviets. We were able to get right up by the elaborate elevated pulpit and got up to the colorful altar. The man working there let us go upstairs to see the organ and choir area. There was a Bible exhibit of Bibles from many countries and times (the oldest one I could make out was from 1750 or so). We took our time and headed back outside. It had stopped raining, so we headed toward the hike along the river.

It started raining.

I decided to duck into a nearby riverside restaurant. It was a little after 4:00, so we would have a ridiculously early supper. It turns out the restaurant was high-end, and supper cost about fifty dollars (which is a lot considering our lunch at the bakery was five dollars), but the food was excellent. And we ate while the rain stopped.

Except it hadn’t.

We headed back to the room to get our raingear and to check on the weather. It stopped raining as we were walking back. The forecast said rain was done, so we added layers on since it was getting into the mid-fifties, and we headed out to the hike.

We got to the river before the rain came back. But this time, it was one cloud, and the rain stopped for the day after just a couple of minutes. The long-awaited hike along the river, which promised, according to my tourist map, “uncharacteristic views of the Old Bridge and the Venta Waterfall,” was underway.

It was a pleasant hike, and we did get to see the bridge and waterfall once or twice, but mostly it was a nice path in the woods next to the river. You could catch glimpses of the river through the trees. After a mile or so, we got to a side path that went down to the river. We went down there and watched the water go by for a couple of minutes and then came back to the old town. I wanted to cross the brick bridge again and walk the other bank past the falls to a swimming area upstream. That gave good views of the falls and bridge, and we were pleased with the hiking portion of the evening. We headed home.

Tomorrow is another day for Team Tourist versus the Latvian national team. We came out okay today, and I expect we’ll be fine tomorrow.

Well, the Matt hit the fan. After four days of letting Meredith plan everything and my just going with the flow, as of today, I’m in charge for a few days. I had some rough vague sort-of ideas of what I was going to do today, so I was pretty sure I’d be fine. That’s mostly true – I do some internet research and have sights that interest me get me somewhere, but I hold those plans very loosely so I can adapt when I actually see the town or area.

We said good-bye to Ventspils and headed southeast toward the well-reviewed cute town of Kuldiga. Kuldiga is where we are spending the next two nights, and it claims to be the most visited town (in the region? in Latvia?). The old town where we are staying is a UNESCO world heritage site, and the travel blogs I looked at all raved about it.

We drove through it.

And we ended up going to just outside town to go to the Riezupe Sand Caves. I’m fond of caves, and these had caught my eye as unusual. I didn’t know anyone mined sand – I thought it was just dug out of a huge pit. I found out/deduced that the sand was mined here because there was a huge slab of very hard rock sitting on top of the sand. So the miners could mine in sideways under the slab to pull out the sand, which was very pure. It was then sent on to Riga to be made into glass. The mine was a series of tunnels because the miners had to leave some of the compact sand in place to help hold up the roof. In all, they dug over a mile of tunnels. You can now tour 500 yards of them. In many places, the roof is only about four feet high and the walls are tight against your shoulders; the guide told us the rest of the mine had “some hard places to get to.” I can’t imagine.

We had to walk about a third of a mile through the woods to get to the mine area. Along the way was a meadow of fancifully carved wooden sculptures; I assume someone the owner knows (or the owner herself) does it as a hobby. With a Latvian couple, we waited at the mine entrance  for our guide. She came along after just a minute or two, and she was much fun. She was young and gave the tour in both Latvian and English, and she was lively and funny. We went though a bunch of tunnels and three or four chambers on the tour. One chamber was supposed to let couples have a long marriage together, one chamber granted wishes and told you your fortune, one chamber told you your personality, and one chamber revealed your sins. It turns out that I’m lazy but happy, and Meredith is a workaholic but makes money. Sounds about right.

The tour didn’t take too long – maybe about thirty minutes – but was fun and a new experience to us. It was a good time.

We then drove forty-five minutes to the very small town of Sabile. I had found a couple of things online that looked interesting to me. We parked the car and walked to the first slightly odd sight – the straw doll house. There’s a woman in Sabile who has made dozens of straw dummies of people doing various things and set them up in her yard. You can tour around them, and can leave a donation if you wish. The woman was actually sitting in the passenger seat of an old car in her yard when we got there. I wasn’t sure if she did that to chat with people, but she was out of luck with the Americans in the yard. The dolls were playing instruments, surfing the web, getting married, playing, pushing baby carriages, and lining up for school, as well as other activities. I’m not sure what got the woman started on the project, but it’s impressive in scope.

When I was looking on my phone for directions to another site, I saw that there was a toboggan run only a couple of miles away. So of course we had to do that. We drove down a couple of dirt roads to get to a campground, and next to the campground was a small amusement area that had three or four attractions. One was the toboggan run, which is different from an alpine slide in that the alpine slide is a car on rails, like a roller coaster, and the toboggan is more like a bobsled on wheels – it can roam on the track. We bought three tickets each.

It was a kicky little ride. First we got pulled up the hill by a line attached to the sled, and the line disconnected itself at the top. Then you were good to go. The man running the sleds told us, “Right turn, lean right, left turn, lean left.” He wasn’t kidding. Even on a short run like this one had, I felt I had to brake for three of the six or so corners because I was coming in too fast. On her second run, Mer didn’t stop leaning as she came out of the last curve, and she fell out of her sled (at a happily low speed). Again, liability seems to be a much smaller deal here in Latvia.

While we were doing the toboggan, I saw a dirt and grass track lined with tires and with options to go in multiple directions on the track. It turns out they had dirt go-karts, sort of like mini dune buggies or jacked-up go-karts. We had to try that. The man there told us they were for kids but that we could ride them. He tinkered with one, and I think he was turning the engine regulator off so the cart could go faster. We asked for a second cart too, and he just wheeled that one out, and it turned out to be much slower than the other cart. As such, Mer and I traded carts after two laps of the four we did. It was a hoot – you could go anywhere on the track and go on dirt or grass. At one point, Mer and I were headed toward each other, but she veered off on another path.

The man mentioned they had a zipline, and that has been on our bucket list for some time now, so after the go-karts, we signed up for that. The man went to the bottom and got another man to meet us at the top of the wire when we walked up the hill. The man there got us into harnesses, and Mer volunteered me to go first. He latched me on to the wire and told me to sit down (into the harness). I did that, and he told me to put my legs up at the end and pushed me off. I let out a startled cry and was off. It was fun – not too fast, but not boringly slow either. The run lasted about 215 yards before I hit the braking mechanism. Then it was Mer’s turn. You could tell by the long cry that lasted the entire run and ended in her laughing. That was very much a good starter run for a zipline for us.

We were off again, back the way we came for a mile or so, to the Pedvale Art Park. It’s a couple of fields full of abstract art. I don’t know how many artists are represented, but there are over 150 works of art in the two fields. We only saw one of the fields because the recent rains made the second field path muddy, but the first field had more of the works. It was roughly a mile around the one field, and it was a good day for a stroll in an outdoor museum – cool and cloudy. We liked several of the works very much, and I don’t think we disliked any of them, although several didn’t speak to my artistic taste.

Finally, we drove back to Kuldiga. We got settled in our hotel and walked down the pedestrian zone to the riverside to go to a pizza restaurant recommended by the receptionist at the hotel. It was a good recommendation. From the restaurant porch, we could see the river with “Europe’s longest (164 m) brick arch road transport bridge.” The superlative is only slightly shorter than the bridge itself, but it is a very pretty bridge. On the other side of us was the Venta waterfall, “the widest natural waterfall in Europe with a width of 249 m as long as you discount that pesky Selfoss falls in Iceland even if it’s on the European tectonic plate.” It’s still a very pretty waterfall; the width does make up for the 6-foot average drop of the falls. It was an ideal place to eat supper, especially when lunch got toured over.

It was such a pretty evening that I decided to seize the touristic moment, and we walked across the brick bridge but headed downstream, away from the falls. We were aiming for the nearby (strangely leaning) new metal five-story observation tower. My guess was that it would allow us to see both the bridge and the falls, and I was right. On the way up, we encouraged a woman who was afraid of heights to keep going, and I think that concern for someone else helped me get over my usual fear of high places. When she made it up, we chatted with her and her boyfriend and a little with his sister. He was from Latvia but living in England, where he met his girlfriend, and he brought her here to meet his family. They were both very kind and friendly. Mer and I spent about ten minutes up at the top, even after the others went down. It was a pleasant view, especially as the sun had some out with some puffy clouds.

We headed back to the bridge area but stopped to grab dessert from a cafe. From there we headed down to the face of the falls. Because the volume of water isn’t terribly high, there’s a jut of land you can walk out on to stand in front of part of the falls. There was a teenager swimming in pool there, and a couple of other people taking pictures. There was a fair din from the falling water, but it was a nice spot.

We went back across the bridge, heading home. I took us through a city park which has numerous sculptures all by the same woman. They were all figures carved from stone, and were really good. The park did get me turned around, and I needed an assist from my cell phone to get us back on the right street, but we made it home a little after 9:00.

Oh – and we think we finally figured out why there are so many cats in pictures and window boxes and such in this area; the tourist information center in Sabile (where we used the bathroom) had the outline drawing of a cat’s head around the Courland area of Latvia where we are. So Courland sort of looks like a cat, and seems to have embraced the symbol.

So my full day didn’t go exactly as planned. And that was the plan.

I’m not sure which is more tiring – our walking forty-seven miles in the last four days, or our covering eight hundred years of history (with some centuries twice). Such was today.

It was a perfect touring day – sunny and cool with a slight breeze. I love walking in this city; there are excellent sidewalks and walking paths, and many of them are shaded by rows of trees, sometimes on both sides of the path. We started the day off by swinging by the Lutheran church to see if it was open. It wasn’t. So we walked two blocks to what is actually the big square of the town, Old Town Market Square. It is quite large and had multiple flower vendors selling wares there this morning, and had a write-up on how this was THE place to own a house back in 1700. The other square (with the church on it) is much smaller, but does seem to have the solstice pole set up in it rather than in the big one.

From the square, we walked to and along the river. It’s still surprising to me how you can be looking across at heavy industrial areas but the pedestrian side of the river is so peaceful to stroll along. We strolled along until we got to a sculpture (and this town is full of sculptures) of a giant Lats coin, which was the money of independent Lativa between the world wars and again from 1989 to 2013, which was when Latvia joined the EU and adopted the euro. A short walk more brought us to:

THE CASTLE OF LIVONIAN KNIGHTS.

This is posted on pretty much every directional sign along all roads near the center of town. “The Castle of Livonian Knights – 1.2 km” and “The Castle of Livonian Knights – 0.55 km” and so on. We managed to gain entrance to the castle itself through the subterfuge of bribing the gate guard (with enough money to gain us a pass to four different museums in town; sly us). It was pretty easy to see why the locals are pleased with the castle. It’s more cheerful-looking than many “here be castle” castles of England, and it dates back to a similar time as many of those castles, to about 1300 for the oldest part, which is the five-story tower.

We found out that we could pay for a guided tour in English, so we did that, and we spent the next ninety minutes in a private tour of the castle, getting the history explained to us by a local Ventspils man about our age. He was interesting himself – he grew up under the Soviets, studied history in school, jumped at a chance to go work in a factory in England for a few years once Latvia joined the EU, and finally came home to work at the castle. He’s also been to the US (Florida and California).

The Baltics were pagan states until about 1200, and became the location of “the northern crusade.” Christian countries (in this case, Germanic peoples) sent in knights to build castles and force the conversion of the Baltic peoples to Christianity. The castle here was one such castle, a frontier castle that historians estimate held about thirty knights along with other servants. There was a network of such small castles in this part of Latvia, but the castle here is the best preserved.

Not that the locals didn’t have to work at it. The Germans used the castle for storage and housing in both world wars, and the Soviets used it for housing and administration until they left the castle in 1983. They did not leave it in great shape. The Latvians spent the 90s and part of the early 2000s restoring the castle to its present form, and it looks great.

Our guide helped us to start to straighten out our understanding about the Liv people who lived here, and the other Baltic tribes who filled in the vacuum once the Germanic peoples pushed the Livonians out and tried to convert them. There are only a few hundred Livs left now, and only about ten people who speak the language, which is more similar to Estonian than Latvian.

We got to see a Latvian hoard that was found on a beach by a person looking for scrap metal. In fact, he sold some of the bronze from the hoard to a scrap dealer who happily called the museum, and they were able to recover it for display. It was mostly of bronze jewelry and looked similar to pieces we had seen in Britain from a couple of centuries before. Bronze wasn’t produced here in Latvia at the time, and so was very valuable and used as a kind of money for bartering.

The castle restorers removed years’ worth of plaster to reveal some fragments of the medieval room decorations, which were Christian-themed with crosses and vineyards and the like. In a couple of rooms, they left the layers of plaster partially cut back so that you can see the walls from different time periods, and our guide pointed out where doors had been moved or windows narrowed according to the contemporary fashion.

Our guide did indicate that he didn’t like the room that was made up as it had been under the Soviets. Who can blame him, really?

We wrapped up the visit to the castle by looking at some Latvian artists’ work, including one from a man who studied in New York and Cleveland back in the 1930s. It was all very influenced by Impressionism, and I was quite fond of it.

We grabbed a light lunch from a bakery, and we ate back at the hotel. After Meredith let me rest my (oddly sore after yesterday) back, we were off, walking a mile or more past the restaurant we went to last night, finishing at the Seaside Open Air Museum, which was included on our castle combo ticket. The Seaside Open Air Museum is a variation on a Riordan vacation staple – the historical regional buildings museum. We’ve been to them in Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Lithuania, the US, and more. We’re fond of them as visual ways to see how people lived.

Not shockingly, given the location and the name of the place, many buildings were devoted to the lives of fishermen and their families. There were places to store nets, and places to dry fish, and there were dozens of boats of all sizes and dozens of anchors of various types. The museum also covered farms and buildings for animals and grain storage. There was a Dutch-style windmill for processing grain, and even two saunas (we are close to Scandinavia). There was even a small railroad, which sadly wasn’t running today. Mer and I found a two-person standing swing set which we managed to use without injury. My attempts at using stilts at the windmill were less successful.

The museum had a new one-year-old museum center that talked about the peoples of the area, which helped firm up some information about the Livs, who were almost all fishermen. Interestingly, the fishermen of the area tended to adopt new ideas and fashions more quickly than the farmers because the fishermen were in contact with outside peoples.

We also learned the fun fact that the serfs were freed in Latvia in 1817, which was almost fifty years before that happened in Russia itself.

We’re not sure of the tie-in, but there were several different cartoon pictures of cats in the museum displays and in the information booklet. We liked that.

The new information center was fairly interactive, with push-button information centers and language translations and even a virtual lady of fashion from about 1900 who mirrored your own movements. We had a good time doing more than just reading things.

The museum wrapped up the touring day, and so we walked a mile or so to supper, passing through “Pittsburgh Park.” We think Pittsburgh is a sister city of Ventspils. The park may be the greatest kids’ park I have ever seen. There were multiple playgrounds, including one that had a three-story enclosed twisty-slide. Mer was tempted to try that but didn’t want to do that with a ton of kids running around. They sure seemed to be laughing and having a good time.

And so we will say goodbye to Ventspils. It’s a fun little city, with parks and sculptures and walking and biking paths and beaches and flowers that are surprising in a city of 35,000 people. We’ve loved how quiet it is here, and were impressed at the signs for parking everywhere in a city that didn’t seem to have a parking problem. We came up with a slogan for Ventspils – “Peace, Parks, and Parking.” Ventspils Tourism, you are welcome.

Not all who wander are lost. Some are just trying to see all of Ventspils on foot. “Ah!” you say. “You have a car.” True. And it sat in its spot all day today. Why drive when you can walk to destinations a mere mile-and-a-half away?

We actually do prefer walking in large towns and cities because you see so much more. We got a long look at beautiful homes with bright colors and carved woodwork. We got to see window displays and shop signs. We got to see impressive churches. And if we had driven, we would have zoomed right past the Soviet-era apartment blocks that were stunning in their total lack of architectural beauty. There were a dozen or more of them, and based on the blocks we saw housing the two thousand people at the spy center, these must hold five thousand or more people. I can understand why the apartments still exist. What I can’t understand is why they were built in a soulless design. What architect goes to school to draw up that?

Anyway, we started the day off with a building on the completely other end of the beauty spectrum – the Russian Orthodox church in town. The outside has been recently renovated, and the domes shine from blocks away. The steeple is brightly tiled, and the paint on the outside is a cheerful yellow and white. The inside of the church still has some renovation to be done up near the roof, but the main eye-level area looked fresh, and there were icons everywhere. Several were interesting to us for their artistry or story; one showed saints being ordered around by men with guns. Our best guess was it was some story from World War I, but we’re not sure. Most of the icons were very colorful, and many had multiple saints in the icon. We spent a fair time looking around the church.

Continuing the church theme, we went on to the Lutheran church on the main (but small) square. There were city workers putting up a pole that is to be lit on fire on the solstice in a few days. Sadly, the Lutheran church was closed, but they did have an exhibit running around the fence of the church. It told the story of about two dozen women who had come in for counseling after having abortions. The issues around abortion are complex, and I’m not going to pretend to solve them here, but the stories did confirm for me that even with legal choice, women still sometimes end up with no choice. Two thirds (or more) of the stories were of women basically forced to have abortions by boyfriends/husbands or their families or even in a couple of cases by their doctor saying it was for the best. Obviously, women coming into a church for counseling are not a fully representative segment of the population, but their stories are still legitimate. It was a thought-provoking display.

We headed off south and west to a park Mer wanted to see. We just strolled along, enjoying seeing things and the nice day. We were walking along a well-shaded path, and so the sun wasn’t an issue. The park itself was great, in the way we had seen in Lithuania. There was a kids’ area, and an exercise area. What was different was that there were quirky sculptures all over – a hat, some buttons, some rock sheep and bulls, a lobster, a shoe with a tongue you could climb. It also had a very impressive bike/skate/scooter park. It wasn’t just a concrete wall to do tricks off of. It was paved with multiple tracks going over bumps and hills and corners and valleys. It seemed very popular, and I can see why. We strolled the park and sat and people watched.

From the park, we walked a long ways southwest to an “adventure park” that had kids’ rides, a disc golf course, an innertube slide, and, most importantly for us, an alpine slide. We had found and ridden one two years ago in Lithuania, and so now we’ve covered slides in two thirds of the Baltic states (you’re on notice, Estonia!). The slide was short (only eight hundred meters long, including the ascent hill), but it was kicky. Slide designers can do some wonderful things with tight turns when they lack overall hill size. We both rode it twice, and had a great time.

We grabbed a light lunch on the way back to the apartment, where I got to relax for about thirty minutes while Meredith planned some stuff. What I didn’t see was Mer was sneaking my swimsuit into her backpack. Since the forecast was for rain in the evening, I assumed I was carrying umbrellas, which I was. But I was also hauling our towels and swimsuits to go to the indoor Water Adventure Park. It was a surprise to me since Mer had been so clever, but it was a nice one. In addition to two waterslides, a rapids slide (super fast), a wave pool, and a warm pool to relax in, there was a spa wing with hot tubs, saunas, an aromatherapy room (where I almost imagined I could smell something in the steam), a cold pool (that Mer tried, the nut), and a Himalayan salt room to relax in.

We spent a couple of hours there, trying everything except the hot saunas. My biggest issues were with the slides. I don’t know if my shorts have weird material, but about halfway down my first run, I pretty much came to a stop. I shoved/paddled myself along, but at the bottom I was still struck from behind by a fun-seeking supersonic tourism torpedo shouting, “I can’t stop!” Happily, she hit me with the heels of her feet to the small of my back, thereby saving any cushy and padded spot on her from being harmed.

The second slide was much the same, with regard to my slowness, and my third trip down was my last one on the waterslides. I figured someone was going to get hurt, and that someone could be me. So I tried the rapids slide. It was a much shorter slide with a bunch of sharp curves in the slide, and all the while, you are swept along by a ton of rapidly moving water. I was thinking, “THIS is more like it!” when I hit the first corner feet-first, legs extended. As my feet hit the wall and were suddenly forced right, the rest of my body weight, aided by a small tsunami of water, crushed into them. It hurt. And it happened again on the next corner. When I got to the bottom, I was left sprawling around in a shallow pool while being shoved by a lot of moving water with the sure conviction that someone else might be coming soon. I did try the slide one more time later on with the idea that I would pull my legs closer to my body. That saved my ankles. At the cost of my butt. And more floundering in the shallow pool after ramming my foot into the bottom.

I went to the spa. That was nice.

After regrouping back at the room, we walked in another direction for a mile or so to go have a nice supper. While we were walking, we got sprinkled on, and we walked home in a steady rain. But we had hats and umbrellas, and we were okay.

So we saw a lot of Ventspils today. It’s a lovely little city on the whole, and easy to get around with wide pedestrian and bike paths, and tons of parking everywhere for those driving. We’re here until Wednesday morning, so we’ll see what tomorrow brings.

The northwest of Latvia juts out into the Baltic Sea, and the tip of that jut is home to the Livs, the smallest ethnic group of Europe. Ventspils is the largest town of the region, and we used that as a launch pad (ha! See more below…) to explore the tip of the region in a counter-clockwise direction.

After breakfast, we headed north to… nowhere.  There was no address we could find, which was consistent with a place that started life as a Soviet spying center. I used the internet to look up the longitude and latitude of VIRAC, home of Latvia’s space telescope center. The GPS found it just fine, turning us off the main road about thirty minutes north of Ventspils, and onto a concrete road. Within a few minutes, we were driving by some creepy abandoned Soviet apartment buildings that had housed the staff and families of the spy facility. We then got to the welcome center, where we paid for our English tour with Markus, a surprisingly mature and fluent sixteen-year-old who works for VIRAC to give tours. We were joined by a young Swiss man named Philip. He was enthusiastic and very funny.

We started our tour heading over to the old control center, which had also been the base of an eight-meter radio dish. The facility also had (and still has) a sixteen-meter dish and a thirty-two-meter dish on top of remote buildings. The thirty-two-meter dish is one of the ten biggest in the world.

The large building next to the control center tower had been used for all the spies listening and going over things, but it is now a huge pile of rubble. It had become unsafe, so the Latvians demolished it in place. Markus explained that it’s easier to know when a building is going to collapse if you just do it yourself.

And that was cool to see, but then came nerd heaven. He let us into the control tower, and it still had the original control equipment in the room, including a massive wire harness that the Russians had wrecked when they left in 1994. But the Latvians were able to get it working again after two years, and it was used for about a decade until newer electronics were installed. That was fun. And then Markus told us we could use the really steep and sketchy-looking ladder/stairs to climb into the basement, where they had shoved all the electronics they couldn’t find anywhere else to put. They had large motors and large junction boxes and switches and wires everywhere. It was great. We climbed back up, and I expected to go outside again when we were told to climb equally suspicious metal ladders to go up to an area decked out with Soviet-era stuff. That included a Russian map that had all western military bases marked on it, and a Latvian/Soviet flag, and a bust of Lenin. In a heartwarming moment that should be a warning to all leaders who think they’re important – the Swiss man asked who the bust was of, and Markus said he didn’t know, but thought it might be Stalin. Young people have forgotten what both Stalin and Lenin looked like, which is great.

We got to head down the hallway that used to lead to the blown-up working center, and it was full of 1970s and 1980s electronic equipment (including oscilloscopes labeled in Cyrillic). There were (illegal) photos that the soldiers had taken of each other, and some wonderfully fun drawings modern-day school children had drawn of the telescope center, including one in which the telescope was staffed by aliens.

Back in the main tower, we got to go up another ladder-stair, and we headed outside to climb more sketchy ladders to get all the way up to where the old dish had been mounted. It was quite the vantage point. We could see the thirty-two-meter dish and trees as far as we could see. It’s not surprising a spying center ended up in the middle of nowhere.

We went back down and outside and walked past a sculpture of Yuri Gagarin (the first man in space) over to the the old original sixteen-meter dish, which was on the ground. Markus told us we could climb up on it. We all clambered up in to the middle of the dish, even with its missing a few small panels. He then said we could climb even higher up to the reflecting mount above the dish, which was not an easy climb. I managed it, and the acoustics up there were incredible. Anything said down into the dish came echoing back to you immediately. I’m pretty sure that liability-conscious American facilities wouldn’t have let us climb all over everything. It was great.

Back on the ground, Markus told us that they had renovated the thirty-two-meter dish about ten years ago, but before the renovation, tours could take people out onto that dish too. What a facility! While we couldn’t go up on the big dish, we could go see it, so Markus led us to an old maintenance tunnel and told us he would meet us on the far end. So I led the way with my cell phone flashlight, followed by Meredith, and then Philip with his cell phone. We walked and walked and walked in the cool, slightly damp tunnel. Someone at some point had made little monster faces on electrical boxes every hundred feet or so, and Philip amused us by telling us the sounds the monsters would make. We also tried turning off our flashlights for a few seconds, and the dark was pretty complete. It turns out the tunnel is 500 meters long (.31 miles). We were walking for quite awhile.

But the tunnel took us to Markus and to the foot of the big dish. We were let in onto the grounds, but were told we had to hang back since people were working. It was a delight to see the dish from the front and from one side, from which we could see the structure that holds the dish up and points it wherever the scientists need it to point.

Understandably, that ended the tour. We went back to the welcome center, where we thanked Markus and said goodbye to Philip. We asked if we could go see the creepy abandoned apartment buildings, and to my surprise, we were told to “go ahead.” So, on the way out, we stopped there.

These were buildings that were lived in until 1994, just thirty(ish) years ago, but they are all in ruins. Mer has a strange fascination with abandoned places, so she was delighted. We walked down the old main street, and decided to go into the last building. The last building looked like a shell from the outside, but it was a real wreck on the inside – the main stairway was falling in, there were holes in the floor and in the ceiling up to the second level, and one wing of the building seemed to have had the internal structures all collapse in on themselves. We were very careful and didn’t stay long since I wasn’t sure where the floor might be weak. Mer loved it.

That wrapped up a hugely successful first outing. We then drove east to the town of Dundaga. It looked to be a pretty town with a large park and a lake/lagoon area. Mer was hoping to see inside the town church, which has an elaborately carved altar, but the church was closed by the time we got there (about 1:00 p.m.). We headed down a side road to find a large sculpture of a crocodile. In the middle of a small town in Latvia. It turns out that a man from the town fought in World War II, but ended up on the American side of Germany at the end of the war. If he went home, he risked being arrested by the Soviets, so he moved to Australia instead, where he lived in a cave where he mined opals for his art. As one does. To make a living, he killed about ten thousand crocodiles and sold the skins. This is supposed to be the inspiration for “Crocodile Dundee” and why there is now a sculpture in town (in addition to a modern one near the castle/great house of the town).

After a cafeteria lunch, we toured said castle. The town castle is more of a great house than intimidating fortress, although the original thirteenth=century building did have walls for defense. We got a tour from a young man (late teens?) whose English was very good, but he did say the castle had to be rebuilt after the “first firework and the second firework.” He meant fire, of course, but I didn’t have the heart to correct him.

The castle now houses the tourist information office, and a small museum, and an after-school program for music and art for the local students. One room of interest was based on the fact that somehow people started sending commemorative medals to the castle at some point, and they now have about a hundred of them. There are medals to Hans Christian Andersen and Goethe and many others from around the world. The contribution from the USA? A medal featuring Richard Nixon. We clearly need to do better.

We got to see all three floors of the house, including some art exhibits of the very talented students, as well as two terraces and the courtyard. It was an interesting tour and good to see a small town try to save its local grand building.

We then drove about twelve miles down a dirt road to go west to get back to the coast on the far side of the peninsula. We tried to find a large dunes area with a boardwalk, but the guidebook was vague, and we never found it. We kept on driving north to Cape Kolka, which is a point where the Gulf of Riga meets the Baltic Sea. We walked along the mostly secluded beach a fair amount, and climbed an observation platform. We tried to hike a pine-tree path, but there were tons of ants everywhere, and one bit my shin, and it actually hurt, so we retreated back to the waterside.

After the Cape, we tried to find the ocean again at a small “village” that was more of a collection of houses that were all posted as private property, so we gave up on that sight.

We finished the touring day by going to the area lighthouse. Mer figured that lighthouses are usually in dramatic places, like the ones in Maine. It turns out the Latvians built this lighthouse on the highest ground around, which is a couple of miles inland, in a farmer’s field. That was amusing. There was a hike down the hill on wooden stairs that led to a boardwalk through the forest, and we walked some of that trail. It was completely quiet except for the birdsong all around us. It was very peaceful.

And so we drove back home, where we got a late supper at 9:00. There are some hits and misses when you travel on your own, and while we had two misses today, the three hits more than made up for them.