Growing up and for many years, I had thought that dunes were the sandy mounds you see at some beaches and in deserts. Then my mom and stepdad bought a house in Weko Dunes in western Michigan, and I learned that dunes can be densely covered in forests and don’t look sandy at all. Granted, if you dug down two inches, you’d hit sand, but I hadn’t realized that dunes could be covered in trees.

That is the case for much of the Curonian Spit. It’s a giant sandbar that stretches sixty miles out from the detached portion of Russia, Kaliningrad, with about half in Lithuania. It’s about two miles wide at the widest and has a tiny opening to the Baltic Sea in the north near Klaipeda. Most of the Spit we saw (the eastern side) is heavily forested with pines. At least some were planted to keep the dunes from shifting, since the drifting sand could cover villages. Back in the 1700s, Nida, where we are staying, had to move, as the old village was subsumed by sand. People later figured out that trees could help stop the drift.

On one side of the Spit is the Baltic Sea, and on the other is the Curonian Lagoon. I kept seeing freshwater birds swimming on the lagoon, which I couldn’t figure out – the lagoon connected to the Baltic Sea in the north, so I figured it had to be salt water. I had Mer look it up, and it turns out that the southern end of the lagoon is fresh water. There is enough fresh water coming into the lagoon in the south from rivers, and the connection to the sea is so small, that the water stays salt-free (except in the north near the opening).

We crossed over on a car ferry from Klaipeda, with the trip taking about five minutes. We drove south on the Spit to the village of Juodkrantė. When we went to Sventoji the other day, we had thought it was going to be a small, cute, sleepy village. It wasn’t. Juodkrantė was, though. We got to the town and passed a few sculptures on the lagoon side of the road. I then realized that the complicated statues were made of sand. I pulled into the next parking lot, much to the amused exasperation of Meredith, who was in charge today. She humored me, and we went and looked at the sand sculptures, which were fantastic.

Mer wanted to tour in Juodkrantė anyway, so we left the car in the lot and walked along the lagoon through a (non-sand) sculpture park for about three quarters of a mile to the entrance to the Hill of Witches. That sounds more spooky than it really was. It should have been called “The Hill of Folk Tales,” but I wasn’t consulted. The Hill is a circular trail up a large, forested dune. Along the way are about eighty wooden sculptures depicting figures from various Lithuanian folk tales. There were many witches, but also ordinary people and animals and dragons. We tried to construct narratives for some of the sculptures. Most were pretty wild, and I’m sure we were wildly wrong. They were all fun to look at, and in a pretty place, so we had a good hike. One highlight was that there was a carved, adult-sized teeter-totter. Neither of us had been on a see-saw in decades, and we had a good time.

We came out of the woods about twenty feet from where we had gone in, and we headed back to the car. I was getting hungry, so Mer directed me to Preila, a really small village on the lagoon. We went to a restaurant which is now in my running for prettiest place to eat. We had a little wooden hut to sit in just for the two of us, and it looked out over the lagoon. There were roses all about, and the air smelled of them. The temperature was mild, and there was a gentle breeze. It was a wonderful stop.

We then proceeded on south to the last Lithuanian village on the Spit, Nida. Nida is the largest Spit village, with 2400 people, but is still very quiet and walkable. And we did just that. After checking into the hotel (and petting the hotel kitty, Lancelot), we walked the town. Mer had picked up a tourist map and decided to go to the places marked on the map. She didn’t actually want to do any specific activity, like museums, but they were destinations to go to in the town.

Some of the pre-supper highlights: we climbed from next to the lagoon up to a summer house built by the German author Thomas Mann. He was only able to use it for three summers before he had to leave Germany in 1933 for being critical of the Nazis. But it’s in a pretty place, and Mer loves literary connections.

We swung by a shop and looked at some wares. I was taken by a pretty, small cello made of amber – about six inches tall. I asked to look at it, and the helpful saleswoman took it out and told me all about it and the 3200-euro price. We left without it. It was beautiful, though.

We checked out the local cemetery. Not only is it in a pretty location, up on the hill of the dune, but the headstones of the area are unique to the Spit. Many are made of wood, and the markers are carved – horse heads for men, and hearts and birds for women. There were also several wrought-iron crosses for more recent markers.

We regrouped at the hotel, and then went to explore the southern part of the town. It was a pleasant walk, as we stuck next to the lagoon. We found a restaurant that was next to a folk museum, and so we were treated to an a cappella group singing traditional songs that seemed to be mostly rounds (repeated phrases spaced apart a few seconds). If we hadn’t been in Lithuania, Mer and I both agreed we would have thought it was Native American singing.

After supper, we had one last outing – we walked along the lagoon to take the stairs and boardwalk up the largest still-migrating dune in the area. It’s about 170 feet tall. We puffed up it, and the views from the top were worth it. Mer had hoped you could see both the lagoon and the Baltic Sea from the top, and you could. You could also see the cheerfully called “Valley of Death” below the dune, where only scrub grass grew, and you could see the curve of land that helped mark the border with Russia (about a mile away, as far as I could tell). The sun was about an hour from setting, but it was still pretty, with some puffy clouds reflecting the evening light. We lingered for about ten minutes, but couldn’t stay for sunset because we have a fairly early morning tomorrow with a four-hour drive back toward Kaunas.

It was a fine stroll back to the hotel, as we stuck by the lagoon for most of the way. The evening had cooled off, and the lagoon waters kept changing color as the sun set. I’m very glad we got out to the Curonian Spit – it’s a special place. But, like the dunes, we too keep moving. On to Trakai Castle tomorrow.

Klaipeda and this region is collectively called Lithuania Minor. It has a complicated history. If Lithuania’s history is tough for an American to figure out, then Lithuania Minor’s history goes to eleven. Complicated doesn’t even begin to cover it.

Mer hit a triple today – three museums in one day, and all for one ridiculously low price. We’ve been joking how every Lithuanian museum costs five euros to get into (about $5.50). My best guess is that museums here are subsidized somehow, because there is no way they can cover costs for five bucks for a ticket. Today, Mer noticed at the first museum that there was a combo ticket for the three museums she was possibly interested in seeing, and the cost for all three together was six euros. For three museums. My sight-loving and thrifty wife was thrilled.

We started the day at the Lithuania Minor History Museum. It focuses on this region – the western part of Lithuania, near the sea. It’s a small area, but has seen many changes. The museum did the museum thing and started in the stone age and worked up to about 1200, but it did so in four large cases instead of four rooms, as we had seen in previous museums. Since it focused more on the Klaipeda area, it focused more on the several tribes here, and that meant they could speak more in depth about customs, especially burial. Graves are one of the major sources of information on the people of the area, and so we got to see a mock-up of what a wealthy woman would have worn based on what they found in her grave. That was interesting; the most unusual thing was the two-pound chain she wore, which had buckles and multiple chains of metal. Iron-age bling was a thing.

As far as I understand and remember, this area was home to a bunch of tribes. They had some dealings with the Vikings, sometimes fighting them and sometimes living peacefully with them. Then European crusaders came along to fight with the pagans (a loose justification for a land grab). One of the groups built a castle here at the mouth of the river and called it Memel. Then, somehow, the Teutonic Order took over and fought the locals for 150 years. Sometimes the town around the castle was burned to the ground, and once or twice the castle was burned.  Then the Teutonic Order ticked off too many people, and Lithuania and Poland joined forces and beat them back in many places. I think the Order signed a peace treaty here, but that’s some of the muddy area for me. The Reformation came along, and the head of the Order converted the Order and founded a Duchy instead. Happily, he was the first duke, so that worked out.

The bottom line of all of this is that Lithuania Minor had a mixture of Lithuanians and Germans. That became tricky, as both Lithuania and Germany laid claim to the land, as well as Poland and Russia by proximity. When Russia controlled the area, for much of the 1800s, they tried to ban books in the Lithuanian language and tried to make the area more Russian. It didn’t work, as a healthy book-and-newspaper-smuggling business sprang up in adjacent East Prussia (which was part of Germany). The Russians gave up in the late 1800s.

Klaipeda was right on the front line in World War I as Germany forced Russia back. Once the war was over, Lithuania Minor was taken from Germany as part of the Treaty of Versailles.  It was run by the victors, and mostly by the French. They eventually gave the territory over to Lithuania, which made it an autonomous region within the country. Then in 1939, Germany forced Lithuania to give it back to them, claiming it was German.

So World War II was terrible for this region. Men were drafted to fight for Germany, and again the front lines ran through here as Germany and Russia fought over the place. By the time the war had ended, a staggering ninety-one percent of the local population had either left or was evacuated ahead of the Russians or was dead. Ninety-six percent of the Jewish population of the area died. The town was a wreck. It’s hard to imagine that this vibrant place has only really been around for about eighty years.

The museum had other exhibits, including on one money in the region. With so many nations coming through, there have been many currencies, even from just 1900. There was a book collection and objects from twentieth-century life and a section devoted to folk living in the 1800s to the mid 1900s. The final room had a collection of decorative pins and a room set up as if it were in the 1970s. Quirky museum.

The second museum was the Castle Museum. There is no castle at the Castle Museum – the castle was torn down in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but the earthworks from around the castle are there, and it looks as if they have construction projects going on to rebuild a visitor center in the form of one of the towers. There is a top-notch museum in the middle of the old castle complex, focusing on archaeological finds from the castle and the Old Town.

Much of what was covered in the Castle Museum overlapped with the info from the earlier history museum, but with more artifacts. We had very good audioguides, and there was a film that introduced us to members of the town from a few hundred years ago. All of the displays were of items dug up here, so that was interesting. The items were, not surprisingly, made up largely of military items and fishing items, as well as broken housewares and some jewelry.

Outside the archaeology museum were two tunnels to explore – one of brick that displayed photos from the early twentieth century, but the placards were all in Lithuanian only, so we made quick work of that tunnel. The other was where ammunition had been stored, and that was dedicated to the years 1939-1945, with dozens of interactive screens and maps. There were photos and a German and a Russian military uniform, as well as films. I was a little sad that we were rushed for time – it would have been easy to spend an hour or more in the bunker. The last display was on victims of the war, told in photographs. One of the saddest ones was a newspaper article of lost persons showing three little girls looking for parents or relatives. In the center of the room was a long table covered in sand. If you brushed the sand away from the glass it was resting on, it revealed photos of people or personal items. It was moving.

It was about 5:00, and the last museum closed at 6:00, so we left the castle complex and walked over to the Blacksmith’s Museum. The museum was made up of ironwork all from one master blacksmith from the early twentieth century. I like ironwork, so this was my cup of tea. The museum was very small – a medium-sized room downstairs, a large room upstairs, and an outdoor courtyard. The work was excellent, especially the crosses done for churches and graves, but the highlight of the museum was the woman working there. She took us around and showed us everything herself, which was immensely kind. Especially since she spoke almost no English (maybe a dozen words, all told). Though speaking to us in Lithuanian, she used gestures and inflection to try to help us understand, and she kept that up for the twenty-minute tour. It was very touching. She really wanted to help us, which is something we have found from all of our museum visits – the docents try hard to make sure you see things by pointing the way to the next exhibit and going with you to make sure the lights are on. Great people.

Having exhausted our museum tickets and ourselves, we went to the main square in the Old Town for supper. The music festival was still going on, and we enjoyed about an hour of swing music and the swing-end of jazz while we ate. That was a good way to relax after being on our feet for much of the day.

Tomorrow we head over to the Curonian Spit, a miles-long sandbar that separates the Curonian lagoon from the Baltic Sea. We’ll have a short ferry ride to get there with the car, and here’s hoping that won’t be too complicated.

Collect them all! Having been to Lithuania’s first, second, and fourth biggest cities (Vilnius, Kaunus, and Siauliai), we added the third biggest city today – Klaipeda, which is only about thirty minutes south of Palanga, where we were last night. Combining the fact that Klaipeda is Lithuania’s only seaport and that it has a population of about 200,000 people, I wasn’t sure what to expect.

It turned out to be a great town, once I ditched the car at the hotel. Our hotel is on the edge of the Old Town, which is on the river, and the river area is pedestrian-centric, with walking paths on both sides of the river, and with wide sidewalks on the main roads, and the Old Town itself has cobblestone streets that keep cars either slow or away.  There are restaurants all along the river area toward the sea, and people were out and about today (although some of that may have been from its being a workday).

Once we got checked into the hotel around noon, we went out in search of lunchfast again. Thank goodness our Klaipeda hotel has breakfast, so we can get on a more normal eating schedule again tomorrow. Mer took us to a restaurant in the Old Town that was next to a large square. While we were waiting for our food, we heard a loud drumbeat for several minutes, then a bass, then horns, and finally vocals. There was going to be a concert in the square at 9:00 tonight, and the band was doing a sound check. They had decided to do swing music, which was tons of fun. We hung out in the square for a couple of songs after we had finished eating, just listening.

Mer took us out of the Old Town, and headed down a street lined with three-story buildings. We stopped in front of a set of stairs and went in. Mer had brought me to the Klaipeda Clock Museum. It was about time! We had actually wanted to see a watch and clock museum last year in Waterford, Ireland, but we ran out of time, so now we got to see Lithuania’s version.

We got an audioguide, which is always useful when the written information in the rooms is in Lithuanian. The museum was on the smaller side – about eight rooms on two floors – but that was okay, since it meant it was something we could do in an hour or two. The audioguide walked us through about forty timepieces of the several hundred on display. The museum started with calendars as the first timekeepers, which were initially just string where you tied a knot for each day (or untied it if there were already knots). We were walked through sundials, and learned the fun fact that the sundial on the side of Saints Peter and Paul Cathedral in Siauliai, which we took a picture of, is the oldest existing sundial in Lithuania. After sundials came water “clocks,” which told time by how fast water leaked out of them, and then fire clocks, which burned things at a steady rate (which included candles as timepieces).

We finally got to clocks as we recognize them, with gears. The earliest clocks rang a bell on the hour, and when hands appeared, there was only originally an hour hand. Minute hands and finally second hands were added later. The first good clocks were pendulum clocks, which kept decent time. Table clocks came along, which were luxury items for the rich. Pocket watches were roughly at the same time.

Clock enclosures were featured as well. The Baroque ones were over the top, as we have come to expect, with brass and cherubs and decorations everywhere, but that was tame compared to the porcelain Rococo style that came next. Porcelain could be made into fantastic shapes and painted, and so the clocks became wildly lavish. Classical tastes came back into fashion after that, and so clocks became more subdued, but were still made of marble and metal, often with military motifs. They were still decorations as much as timepieces.

My favorite watch was a pocket watch that had a pastoral scene. When wound, the watch turned a waterwheel on the mill and the nearby goat raised and lowered its head while it ate.

We continued down the road for a bit. Mer wanted to go to a sculpture park, but it was fenced in and being worked on by crews, so we had to give up on that one. We came back down the same road, but were able to salvage our dose of art by going to the local art museum, the Pranas Domsaitis Gallery.

This was an interesting museum. It featured Lithuanian artists, and mostly just four of those. There was a woman sculptor who had made a very heroic-looking woman statue along the park in Siauliai. There was a painter who had worked in exile in South Africa after 1941, and he was highly prolific. He was largely unknown in Lithuania until an American Lithuanian group bought his collection from his widow and donated it to Lithuania. The museum is now named after him, and there were a couple hundred of his paintings being shown. There was a male sculptor who worked largely from the United States after the Soviets took over, and he was well respected enough that he was given the job to sculpt the founder of Vilnius – we had seen that statue outside the cathedral in Vilnius. Finally, for focusing on artists, there was a photographer who specialized in photos of plants.

There was one exhibit that didn’t focus on artists – it focused on women as the subject, and was called “Divas.” The paintings were almost all twentieth century and most were featuring just one woman. It was cool to see the various takes on the same subject material.

The museum building itself was fun and impressive. We’d go into a room expecting it to be a dead end, and there would be more rooms beyond it. Stairways popped up in random places. We blew through the museum at a relatively quick pace, but seeing all of it still took almost two hours.

We headed back to the hotel to recoup – I was out of water, and both of us had sore backs. I was able to pick up a strawberry smoothie at a bakery on the way home, and other sugar-based goods may have gotten consumed, which helped some. We are both of an age now at which I always pack a heating pad for various aches, and it came in handy.

Once we could move more easily, we went back to the river, almost to the end where it meets the sea. We were talking about how a ramshackle old building was a bit of an eyesore across the river from all these new spiffy buildings when Mer realized the restaurant we were aiming for had a sign on the wall of said eyesore building. We went through it (it appeared to have been an old warehouse), and then into a pub. It turned out the pub didn’t serve food, so we went back to the main road just outside of the Old Town to have supper.

Finally, we went back to the square in the Old Town to hear the swing band. It was a festive crowd without being packed in too tightly, and the music started about fifteen minutes after we got there. We were expecting swing, like what we had heard at lunch, but the band came out playing salsa. They were quite good at it, but we really had been looking forward to swing. We enjoyed watching the crowd and listening to the music, but gave up on thinking they might change genre after half an hour of salsa.

We walked back to the hotel and got in about 10:00. I’m looking forward to discovering more of the town tomorrow, and even starting the day with breakfast.

Sometimes travel is inefficient. Things take longer or wrong turns get made. That was me on Monday night when I somehow managed to miss the main drag in Palanga entirely, and took several wrong turns trying to get back to the hotel. It happens. Today was one of the days when several inefficiencies crept in. Good things still happened, but we had to keep at it and make some changes along the way.

We slept in quite late for us on a European vacation (9:30) because we had been up so late last night. We got on the road to head a few miles north to what was, according to our guidebook, “a quiet fishing village.” It may have been a village, but it wasn’t quiet, and there was no fishing going on that I saw. The village has miles of beach, and everyone in the tri-Baltic area was on them today. I have no idea what the town is like on a nice Saturday.

Because the word “village” implies “small,” Mer had thought we could drive up, park, walk to the beach, and see a thirteen-foot-high sculpture from the eighties called The Fisherman’s Daughters, which depicts three windswept daughters looking out to sea for their father. The artist’s niece said it represented  the three Baltic states looking to the West to help them get out from under the Soviets. It’s an impressive work of art, or so we had been told.

We never got to see it, sadly. We found parking and followed a steady stream of people through a line of shopping shacks set up along the road. We crossed a suspension bridge over a lagoon and walked over a boardwalk to the beach. We didn’t see any signs for the sculpture, so I looked it up on my phone. It was about a mile down the beach, which was crowded and sandy, as beaches often are. It would have taken at least an hour to walk there and back, and we had only paid for an hour of parking. So we walked along the Baltic Sea for a bit, and we both dipped our toes in. It was…how shall I say?…not warm.

We figured we could drive to the sculpture, so we got in the car and drove south to where we could get to the beach again. There were cars everywhere and nowhere to park. We drove around for several minutes, but couldn’t read the signs about parking, so we didn’t know if they said something like “residents only.” We finally had to give up and move on to the next town. But we did see a fog-free sea and thousands of Lithuanians at play, so that was cheering.

We went inland to the nearby town of Kretinga. We quickly found parking, and set off for Mer’s next destination, the Kretinga Museum. It turned out to be about a half-mile away because the GPS hadn’t recognized the exact address, so we set off on foot. Keep in mind that the day was quickly becoming the warmest day of our trip, topping out at around 86 degrees. We were fine, but going though our water quickly. When we got to the museum, they had parking across the street. Inefficiencies creep in.

We hadn’t eaten breakfast or lunch yet, and it was 1:30 in the afternoon, so we bought museum tickets and beelined for the cafe. That was great. The museum is housed in a former mansion (the same family line who built a mansion in Palanga – this was an earlier family home), and the restaurant is housed in the former winter garden (an attached greenhouse). It was a soothing place to eat and drink and drink and drink. We polished off a whole pitcher of water with our extended meal.

After lunchfast, we explored the museum, starting in the basement. That led us to the main floor of the winter garden and several exhibit rooms. There was a room dedicated to Lithuanian coins throughout the ages (I think it was a temporary exhibit). The other rooms were the same as in the Šiauliai museum – somehow summarizing history of the region from pre-history to around 1300 in four exhibits, none of which were in English, although it was laid out well enough that we could follow it. They managed to cram in one last room dedicated to the preservation and celebration of the Lithuanian language and culture.

The second floor was a bit random. There was an exhibit on the history of communication in the area, with model telegraphs, a teletype, and several models of phones. There was finally a placard in English that explained that several counts installed telephones between their mansions just seven years after Bell invented the device, and that they used to allow people to come in to see how the phones worked. They were all one party line, so the caller had to blow in a special hole that transmitted a whistle to the whole system, so you had to have special codes for each person you were trying to reach. Mer got to take a simulated call on the model of the first telephone, but I don’t think the count on the other end was listening too well.

There were a few small displays on sports, including what looked to be motorbike soccer. There was a model of a couple of churches in the town, and many photos and portraits of the family, as well as early photos of the house.

The third floor had furniture of the house (or from the mansion in Palanga), and multiple family trees. It seems as if the surviving line of the former counts consists of two brothers born in Los Angeles in the 1980s.

From the house, we walked out into the grounds, now a large park. There were no gardens like in Palanga, but the trees were all mature and huge. We wanted to find the astronomical calendar (that had been built by the count around 1900) as an excuse to see the park. We followed a sign that told us to go straight, so we did. The calendar was supposed to be three hundred meters down the path, so when we had gone five hundred or more, I looked it up on the phone. We were supposed to go straight down the path for about one hundred meters, and then fork off for the last part, but there had been no sign. Inefficiencies creep in again.

The calendar was cool, and must have existed to be cool since no one needed a sun calendar to tell them the date in 1900. The sun shines through a hole in a pillar, and where the shaft hits tells you one of several dates (like the solstices). I’m guessing it works at noon or some such, because the sun was well past the hole by 4:30.

Some of the manor outbuildings were open as exhibits. One of them was a folk museum, showing how life was for farmers in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They had masks and costumes and tools on display. I had two takeaways – life looked hard, even just 150 years ago, and the farming communities seemed to have a ton of superstition wrapped up in Christian dates and rituals. If you worked on certain saints’ days, you would have a bad crop, and so on. Bread was important – if you dropped a loaf, you had to pick it up and kiss it. If a child was sick, you laid him on top of a warm loaf of bread.

We finished the museum and took a look around the town, to go find a duplicate of the Lourdes Grotto. There was a cave made in a park, and copies of statues of St. Bernadette and of Mary were placed in it. It was a peaceful spot, with benches and a stream.

We walked up to the nearby Franciscan church to see it, passing a park along the way. This small town had the usual park – volleyball, basketball, soccer, workout equipment, full track, sand volleyball, and a playground. Lithuanians really seem to love their public spaces. The church was very pretty, and seemed to be decorated with some green vines inside, but we couldn’t investigate too closely because Mass was happening.

One last stop for the town – we checked out the cemetery we had parked across from. It had one of the prettiest brick chapels I have ever seen, which is where the local count and his family are buried. We couldn’t get in because it had just closed at 5:30. The church is built on a mound, so we were able to look around at the rest of the cemetery from there. Most of the gravestones looked to be newer – I’m not sure if they were replacements for Soviet-era headstones or not, but the entire space looked to be well taken care of. Many European cemeteries are crowded, with no space between graves, and this was one of those; in fact, it wasn’t clear that there was any available space left inside the walls of the courtyard. There was another cemetery across the street, so maybe that was a newer one.

We drove back to Palanga, to our hotel, where Mer decided she couldn’t stand the fact that the hotel had an outdoor ping pong table and we hadn’t played. So, despite the warm evening, out we went. Admittedly, Mer had the poor end of the table – there was a glare on her side, and a woodpile on her left, and I think the table tiled up toward her, but nonetheless, for the first time in twenty-five-plus years, I beat Mer at ping-pong, 21-17. To reinforce my idea that there was a “good” side of the table, we switched sides, and Mer won the second game 21-18. But she is no longer undefeated. She thinks she may have been sluggish from the heat and all the walking, but she rallied plenty for the second game.

We took welcome advantage of the small but nice pool on the grounds. We were both hot and sticky from the day and the game, so a dip worked out well. After that, we walked back into town along the hike-and-bike trail and had supper on the quiet end of the strip, where we could people-watch. We finished up the night with a common experience for us – there was a Ferris wheel near the beach, and we rode it. It joined wheels we have ridden in Paris and London and Austria and Ireland. A walk back home along the now well-known path got us home at a leisurely but efficient pace.

Yesterday I struggled to figure out the layout of Palanga, and had some difficulty even with a phone showing me maps. Meredith was much better today. She managed to get around town by walking all of it. Twice. We put in a new (for us) record of walking 35,000 steps, or about 18 miles. Happily, it’s a pretty town.

Our hotel doesn’t offer breakfast, so we walked to a bakery recommended to us by our hostess, got some food, and went down to the beach to eat while blissfully looking at the…fog. Palanga had no rain today, but was socked in by fog for the entire day. It lightened some as the day went on, but never went fully away and came back thicker as the day cooled off from the balmy sixty-five we got to.

It was still very peaceful eating by the ocean. We could hear the water, and even see about two waves’ distance. Occasionally, people-shaped fog beings would materialize and then quickly fade away. Once we were done eating, Mer decided we should walk along the beach. She had a destination in mind, which we couldn’t see, but there is a very, very long pier that crossed our path, so we had a fogmark.

The pier loomed up in front of us, which was a clear indication to walk out on it. That was a strange experience. After just a few feet, the beach disappeared, and we were surrounded by water and fog. It just stressed how hopeless we would be if we were in a boat in the fog – the only indication of land we had was the knowledge the pier started somewhere.

Back on solid ground, we continued on south, but Mer wanted to take a scenic route, so we used the town’s seemingly endless boardwalk system that cuts through the forest that borders the beach. The townsfolks have somehow not only kept development from happening right on the beach, but they have also kept really tall (and so, I presume, really old) trees looming in a belt all along the shore. I have no idea how the trees escaped the Soviet lumber mills, but I’m grateful that such a beautiful place was preserved.

We popped back inland when we took a boardwalk in that direction, and we stayed on the pretty street we were on rather than go back out on a boardwalk. We followed the road to the corner of the Palanga Botanical Park. This large park (247 acres) is made up of more very mature trees, and has several gardens in the park. It’s a gorgeous place to walk. We went into the park, just strolling along, until we came to a set of stairs. I let out an inadvertent gasp of excitement, since I like to climb up things, and Mer rolled her eyes before indicating we were going that way.

We climbed up to the the top of the hill, which a sign later told us is actually the largest sand dune in the area. On the well-forested top was a small brick chapel. I could understand why – it was peaceful, and many people must have agreed, since the sign also said it had once been a pagan worship site.

We went back down the hill and deeper into the park until we came upon the back of a mansion. We were there to tour the second floor of the house, which contained the Palanga Amber Museum.

Amber is found in great quantities in the Baltics, if only from all the street vendors hawking it to tourists. But besides telling the story of how amber formed, how it was mined or gathered, and how it was worked, the museum has thousands of amber objects on display, many of which are rare. We got a tablet that was to be our audioguide in English and got set to learn all about amber. All we needed to do was hit the number on the tablet that matched the number on the display case. Easy.

Except this is a Lithuanian museum! That means the numbers tend to go in order, but by no means are required to. We shared many confused looks as 7 followed 5 and 6 was found across the room by itself. At least a couple of the 31 explained objects were either missing or not labeled. We still managed it, if with some grumbling.

Amber is fossilized tree sap. It is famous for being made into jewelry because of its warm, brownish, translucent color, and for having trapped bugs inside it as it oozed down the tree. This museum had many examples of both. In fact, they claimed to have one of the largest collection of inclusion amber (when it had a bug inside) in the world, which helps scientists with ancient specimens of bugs, and lets movies like Jurassic Park get made. The museum even has an inclusion of a lizard, of which there are only half a dozen in the world. It requires a dead animal to get coated by amber before the animal gets eaten or rots.

As a bonus, we got to tour the bottom floor of the mansion, which was build by a rich count around 1900. He and his wife sounded like decent people – the count paid for several public buildings, and the countess educated local peasant girls and paid for more schooling in Vilnius for the talented learners.

Anyway, the audioguide covered the house too. With no identifying numbers. And going in backwards order. Mostly. Except when it skipped around a couple of times. And the pictures on the tablet were old and so didn’t exactly match the actual rooms anymore. Otherwise, it was fine.

The house was grand and pretty, but the front and back gardens were where the real action was at. For some reason, roses love the climate here, and they haven been in bloom everywhere we have gone. Since we had come in by the back, we left by the even grander front, which led us along the count-made pond with cute bridges crossing it.

We made our way out of the park to go to the main tourist strip in this beach resort town. Along the way, we saw a sculpture park, so we made a note to come back to it. It was 3:00, and we needed a lunch of some kind. The fog hadn’t burned off, but breakfast had. We found the main tourist gauntlet, and it was every bit as gloriously tacky as the one in Gatlinburg or other tourist towns. We grabbed lunch at a Cuba-themed restaurant where we ate traditional food like French fries and a beet salad. At least Mer got to sit in a cool covered chair stuffed with pillows.

After lunch we went back to the sculpture park, where we saw about twenty sculptures, mostly figures and mostly from about 1960 to about 1985. It was a good reminder that artists in the Soviet Union could put out art that wasn’t just about glorifying the proletariat.

I was having some lingering stomach issues from the late morning, so we walked back to the hotel and got resupplied with water, as well as taking things easy for forty-five minutes. Then, back to town! Mer told me I could go back the the gardens to see more, so that was the plan.

But travel sometimes throws you a great curveball. As we were walking toward the strip, we passed next to a square where we heard music and noticed that the fountain in the square was changing with the music – it was a dancing fountain. Obviously, we had to stop. For forty-five minutes. The surreal kept getting cranked up as we heard “Pour Some Sugar on Me” as the background to jets of water in a small town in Lithuania. Add in a Lithuanian doppelganger of my mother (even Mer saw it in the woman), and for good measure have four thirty-ish moms dancing choreographed dance moves to the music while their kids raced around the square, and you have an unusual evening.

We still wanted to see the park, so we left the fountain and moms to their dancing. We were a little pressed for time since it was pushing 8:00 and the park closed at 9:00, but we made it to a formal garden area that had roses and statues. We passed by the mansion again, and made our way out of the park around 8:30. We went back to near the strip, where we had a light meal in a Ukrainian restaurant.

It was now almost 10:00, but Mer wasn’t done. We walked the short distance to the pier, where we sat on a bench to watch the sun (?) go down over the sea (?). We mostly saw more fog rolling in, but there was a very talented busker playing piano, so that was nice.

After a short mile-and-a-half walk back to our hotel, we had wrapped up a successful, if foot-weary, day. Tomorrow Mer is going to let me use something called a “car,”  which sounds exciting.

Dirt (and sand) was an important theme today. From roads to holes to beaches, dirt was an issue. We left the Šiauliai hotel this morning and drove west for about two hours, following my GPS. I wasn’t paying too close attention (I was in mid-yawn) when it told me to turn left. I hadn’t even seen a road there, and that was largely because it was small. It was a one-ish lane road taking us into the middle of a national park. Fair enough.

Then the pavement ended, and we got our one-ish lane dirt road. In a sign of how dedicated Lithuanians are to the outdoors, the wide and paved sidewalk continued. As we bounced along the dirt road, Mer began to question where the heck we were going, and thought maybe the GPS was wrong. Nope. We pulled up to a parking lot outside a mostly empty field that was gated with four layers of barbed and electric wire. I have the best outings for my wife.

We were in the middle of nowhere because that is where the Soviet Union decided to build its first underground missile base. They chose this site in Lithuania because it was close enough for the mid-range missiles to hit all of western Europe, and because the soil was sandy, making it easy to dig. And, when you have a nigh endless supply of labor, you bring in ten thousand soldiers with shovels to dig out four missile silos by hand. I’m not sure if digging equipment would have been seen by spy flights or if the men were just cheaper, but they dug out four one-hundred-foot-deep silos and the support/command bunkers, all by hand.

The grounds of the base had been protected by four or five layers of wire. Some of them were just barbed wire, but all of them could detect a breech and alert the commanders. One fence delivered a lethal amount of electricity to anyone who touched it. The fences were also patrolled, and there were phones hidden in trees for efficient communication.

The bunker was entered though three pressure doors. In the case of an attack, the underground could be sealed off for up to three days, and it could withstand a nuclear blast from just a few miles away. The base missiles were pointed at Great Britain, West Germany, Norway, and Spain at various times. The silos became operational in the early sixties and were abandoned in the early eighties when the missiles there had become obsolete and it would have cost too much to update the silos. The men had to be able to report to duty within four minutes of an alarm sounding, and the rockets could be launched in forty-eight minutes. Happily, they never were. But it was close.

I knew about the Cuban Missile Crisis, of course. I had forgotten it was brought on by the US putting missiles in Turkey. Cuba was the first time the Soviets put missiles outside of their own border, and the US, to put it mildly, freaked. Kennedy embargoed the supply ships coming into Cuba, and the US went to DEFCON-2 (out of 5, where 1 is active nuclear war) for the only time in our history. Kennedy was within a few hours of authorizing an invasion of Cuba when diplomacy prevailed. The Soviets would withdraw their missiles if the US promised to not invade Cuba and if the US removed all nuclear weapons from Turkey. That worked for everybody.

(One odd note about the Cuban Missile Crisis display in the bunker – there were original newspapers from the time, and they were all The Bennington Banner. Bennington is a small town in Vermont. Not The New York Times or The Washington Post. The Bennington Banner. How does that even come to be?)

The second close call, the one I didn’t know about, was the “Prague Spring” uprising. In 1968, the new president of Czechoslovakia called for democratic reforms. The Soviets were afraid that the the Czechs would join Western Europe and that other Soviet-bloc countries would follow. So they sent in 500,000 troops and 5,000 tanks to put down any reforms. The leaders of the Soviet Union feared that NATO would invade Czechoslovakia, so they ordered warheads loaded on all missiles in Eastern Europe, which was the only time that happened.

In the end, the Americans and Soviets had enough power to wipe out the entire planet, so Reagan and Gorbachev signed a treaty to destroy all medium-range missiles. Both countries still had plenty of long-range missiles, but it was a start.

We learned all of this in the bunker for the silos. The various rooms housed information on the Cold War, on Soviet propaganda, on weapons and missile development, and more. We saw where fuel was stored (away from the men because it was so toxic), where the men worked (the radio operator was never allowed to take his headset off while on duty, so the wire was fifty feet long to let him go to the bathroom), and various other rooms. The large room that used to hold pressurized air had been converted to a film room showing peaceful scenes of nature and cities and museums. If you pushed the red button in the room, the room went red and the film was replaced by footage of test explosions of nuclear bombs. It was very effective.

The tour showed off the majority of support rooms on the two levels of the bunker. It ended, not surprisingly, with one of the four silos itself. Even today it is an impressive sight.

Our audioguide welcomed us to the museum and said we would be there about an hour. In the Riordan-house way of touring museums, we were there for three hours. It was a really well-done museum.

I had toyed around with going on to a World War II German bunker along the coast, but decided to get to our hotel in Palanga instead. Palanga is a small resort town on the Baltic Sea. As we drove up to our hotel neighborhood, it became odd. The houses and buildings were all new and top-notch – not cheap. But the road was mud. Our best guess is that the builders finish all the buildings first, and install the roads last. It creates an unusual juxtaposition. The hotel here really is very nice.

I decided to walk to the beach to see the sea. That took us by a large and pretty park of mature pines, and got us to the beach, about ten or fifteen minutes from our hotel. My plan of walking to town along the ocean was foiled by the tide being in, and it being very difficult to walk in the loose sand. It was a cool day and cloudy, and the water was only 55 degrees, so the beach was pretty deserted. We headed back to solid footing.

That wasn’t so bad. We started walking along the paved hike-and-bike trail that goes fifteen miles to the next town, and I saw a boardwalk. We took that, and it dumped us into the park forest, which led to a canal, which led to more boardwalks, and finally to the center of town. We did some mid-vacation errands (new toothbrush, fingernail clippers, cash from an ATM), and found an Italian place for supper. Even though they didn’t have English menus, they used enough Italian names for us to get a good meal. We followed that with dessert from a French bakery.

That was about it. We took a meandering, check-the-cell-phone-often way home that left me even more confused about navigating the town. It was almost like having sand in my eyes, but maybe it will be clearer tomorrow when Meredith takes over for two days here in town.

Mer had a museum day planned for today, and one of the slightly odd aspects of the museums we saw today was their lack of concern for keeping the years in strict order.

The final museum we saw today was the Frenkelis Villa Museum. Chaimas Frenkelis was a Jewish leather worker who came to Šiauliai because Šiauliai had excellent railroad connections. He started a little leather-working business, and ended up with a huge factory that had some people calling Šiauliai the “leather capital of the world.” Frenkelis came here in the late 1800s, and eventually had a mansion built next to his factory.

I know next to nothing about leather, but Frenkelis came up with ways to make it soft, and with high quality. His product took off, and he became very wealthy (this was in the early 1900s, before the Soviets came in the 1940s). He seemed to be a decent man, supporting Jewish culture and city establishments, helping his workers, and more. He was awarded a medal from the government of Lithuania for his social involvement.

Then World War I came. I had not known that Lithuania was on the German/Russian front lines, but it was. The Russians were forced back, and Germany took Šiauliai for a couple of years. In their doing so, sixty percent of the buildings in the city were destroyed, and I think the population dropped by three quarters. Frenkelis fled with his family to Russia before the Germans got here. The family came back after the war, but Frenkelis died soon after. His son rebuilt the factory, but it never reached the pre-war production it had enjoyed.

My villa history gets a little muddy in and around World War 2. As far as I can tell, the Germans used the house as a headquarters, and then later the Soviets turned it into a hospital for fifty years. When it was finally turned back over to Lithuania in the early nineties, it was in rough shape. The house was restored, and I’m glad it was.

The house is now home to a history of industry in the area, but we could only look at pictures since we can’t read Lithuanian. The second floor held art in most of the rooms, except for the dining room, which was set up for a formal dinner. That was all fine, but the gem of the tour was the house. Look up and look down in great houses. The floors were all wooden and were lovely, but the ceilings were gems. The house was built in an art-deco style, and I’m a big fan. Every room had a different ceiling, and many were deco in style. Some were simple, and some were more complex, but they were all compelling. I want to deco my ceilings now.

Our tour took about an hour, and we closed the place out. We were still able to enjoy the pretty rose gardens of the home – it is open until 10:00 to the public as a park. There were all kinds of roses, which were in bloom, and a cool four-headed fountain, all with the house as a backdrop. Mer and I sat on a bench next to the fountain and relaxed.

After church, Mer took us back toward our hotel. We were looking for a specific address, but it seems Šiauliai has a novel way of numbering addresses. Even numbers are on one side, and odd numbers are on the other. Fine. But the evens and the odds don’t have anything to do with each other. House number 42 is across the street from house 23. It can make finding a building difficult. We were looking for number 47, and when we got to 45, the next building changed because it was on a crossroad. Okay. But then the next number was also out of order, because that address was still attached to the first building, even if that was around the corner. We finally found 47, but it was harder than it could have been.

Mer had brought us to the Šiauliai History Museum. That was fun, as it has been hard for us to keep track of the complicated twists of Lithuanian history, and especially that of the last 250 years. The museum is a decent size, with three levels of exhibits. We started in the basement, which covered pre-history to about 1300. There was one exhibit safety sensor in the whole museum, over a simulated grave with some early bones and artifacts. I set it off by pointing at something for Mer. Serves me right.

The second floor made a jump to about 1700. I think. The second floor played loose with this whole chronology thing. One placard would talk about 1800, and the next would be about 1750. The exhibit picked up in the early 1800s, but still had a mysterious order to events. As far as I can tell, and this isn’t authoritative, Šiauliai history went something like this: the Duke of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania set up Šiauliai  as some sort of economic zone, and rented it to rich people. They had the job of keeping the economy going, but making sure it stayed under some level, or the city would become a “free city.” At some point, a duke bought the whole place and kept it for himself, and it eventually became a free city. One duke was forward-thinking and did a lot of good for his farmers by hosting agricultural exhibitions and modernizing equipment. On the bigger stage, it sounded as if Poland-Lithuania got broken up by Russia in the 1800s, who in turn got booted by Lithuania after WW I. Then I think Poland came back in until 1941, when the Germans rolled in. They lost the war, and the Soviets took over for fifty years until 1991. Simple.

The third floor of the museum was my favorite. I had notice over the last few days that there are carved wooden sculptures everywhere in Lithuania – many are religious in nature, but Šiauliai has many quirky ones in the park next to our hotel. The third floor of the museum was almost all carvings, from religious statues to coat racks to bobbins for wool to masks for holidays. Standing before an entire wall of carved wooden crucifixes is impressive. They also had one case of highly decorated eggs that were so detailed as to take them well past the realm of folk art. It was a fun place to explore.

We left the hotel after breakfast and walked toward the main square. As we got to the cathedral, Mer steered us into the church. She declared that people go to church on Sundays. Even people who don’t speak the language. So, our second Mass in a Lithuanian cathedral. It was quite beautiful. The cathedral was surprisingly simple and harmonious inside. It was painted all white, and the windows were prismed clear glass instead of stained glass. Even the Stations of the Cross were made of white plaster or wood or such.

And then the music got off to a great start. The opening song was sung by a small men’s choir accompanied by an acoustic guitar. I had never heard a guitar in a cathedral service before, and it worked really well for the tune they were singing. The men singers kept singing throughout parts of the service, but the organ played the rest of the time until the last song, which was guitar and voices again. In that acoustic space, it was special.

I also liked that the bishop proceeded down the aisle, making eye contact with people and blessing them with the sign of the cross. When he saw two children, he stopped even though the rest of the processional in front kept going. He laid his hands on the children’s heads and smiled. It was touching.

The rest of the service was interesting to see what we could recognize, which wasn’t much, but wasn’t nothing either. In all, it was a good way to start the day. We left the cathedral and circled around it, looking at the many wooden sculptures that were on the grounds, as well as a large sundial next to a pretty metal cross.

After the history museum, we headed back down to the pedestrian street and took it to almost the other end, where Mer continued her museum day with the Bicycle Museum. This museum had three floors, although really only the top two had bikes on display. We thought we would see the evolution of the bike over time, but that again shows my narrow-minded approach to time. There were military bicycles from the 1940s next to a tandem bicycle from the 1980s. We discovered that Šiauliai has had a well-respected bike factory since the 1950s or so, and that explains why the museum is here. They had the one millionth and five millionth bikes produced on display.

It surprised me how many bikes were just one-speed bikes you associate with French women pedaling though the countryside with a front basket of wine and a baguette. Probably seventy-five percent were of that variety. They did have two weird semi-unicycles from the 1980s – they were like unicycles with training wheels – they had one big wheel with pedals attached, but had two very tiny (think roller skates) wheels attached out in front to lean into. I’m not sure what market they were trying to hit, but one was from the United States and one from Germany, so someone thought there was a market.

From the pictures of athletes on the wall, it looks as if Lithuania has a successful women’s bicycle program – most of the pictures were women. There was also a story of a seventy-three-year-old Lithuanian man who organized a trans-USSR ride. Sadly, he died in an accident along the way, but the ride did finish. Another Lithuanian man, a forty-seven-year-old physicist, organized a “ride around the world” trip of five continents, starting in Seattle and finishing in Hiroshima. He wanted to promote peace and sustainability, and over six hundred people took part in the ride at some point (four people total finished the fifteen-thousand-mile ride).

We had surprisingly great weather today for a day forecast to be raining much of the day. It never rained at all. After supper, we were walking back to the hotel, a bit disappointed that we had missed getting dessert from a bakery by just a minute or so (they had just closed), when we heard classical music from the park next to the hotel. We walked over to investigate. Just as we got to the outdoor amphitheater, the music stopped, and people started spilling out onto the walkways. We were disappointed, but siren-like, the music had led us on to an ice cream stand that was open. We had dessert in a lovely park.

So, all in all, a very good day. No rain and still dessert and we learned a bunch about the local area. Here’s hoping tomorrow lines up at least as well.

When the alarm went off this morning, we could hear hard rain against the skylight of our room. That was a bit discouraging, but we got ready and went downstairs to have an excellent breakfast. It was funny – the American guys who work for the defense contractor were down there, so there were five Americans and two Italians in the breakfast room. It sounded as if we were at Bob Evans. Anyway, by the time we were done, the rain had stopped, so we were off on another day of touring adventure (with Meredith in charge).

Meredith’s Mistake Maxim: when you travel, you will waste time and/or money. You just need to accept it and try to correct what you can.

We left Kaunas in a steady rain this morning. Mer was in charge and tried to program my GPS to go to our next site in the north. There were two of them, so she guessed at one. It was north and the right distance away, so off we went.

Mer gets sleepy in cars, so I let her doze on and off over the next hour. We came to a blocked road, and while I asked the GPS to get us around it, Meredith became suspicious of where we were. She grabbed our paper map (it’s like a GPS, but you can’t zoom) and looked at the two sites. We were headed to the wrong one, a mistake that would take forty-five extra minutes to correct. She spent a good chunk of that time wondering why she hadn’t just looked at the map in the first place, but who would have guessed there would be two places with the same name, both in the north, both the correct distance away, but still fairly far apart? I told Mer that maybe the rain would stop in the extra forty-five minutes.

We got to our destination with no further issues. We arrived at Kryzių Kalnas, the Hill of Crosses. Just north of the town of Siauliai is a hill covered in approximately 200,000 crosses. No one is sure how it started, but by the time the Soviets rolled in in the 1940s, there were over 400 crosses there. The Soviets removed them. The locals replaced them. Five times the Soviets removed the crosses, bulldozed the hill, covered the area in sewage, and finally gave up in 1985 because the locals kept replacing them. The hill has become a symbol for Lithuanian independence.

One very cool thing is that the rules governing the site allow anyone to place a cross anywhere, as long as it is under two meters (6.5 feet) tall, and as long as it doesn’t destroy previously placed crosses. This included nailing or hanging smaller crosses on existing bigger ones. Mer had very cleverly brought a cross with us from home, so she placed it in one of the “arms” that extend from the hill.

It was still raining when we got there, but not enough to interfere with touring the site. We were there about ninety minutes, and the rain lessened until it finally stopped about forty-five minutes in. That was nice.

Several of the crosses had the “distressed Christ,” which seems to be a Lithuanian image of Jesus. We’ve never seen it anywhere else, but have seen multiple examples here over the last few days. It is an image of Jesus, sitting down, leaning his head against his right hand, and looking sad.

Several of the NATO air squadrons had erected crosses for their air groups while stationed at the nearby airbase. There was an intricate life-sized version of St. Francis. Someone had made a cross out of bicycle gears. Many crosses were decorated with folk carvings. There was a hidden “cave” made by the branches of a fir tree that was filled with crosses. There was a cross made from a computer memory stick, and one made of nails nailed into a board.

The site itself is much larger than I thought. As I mentioned, there are two arms of crosses that extend out from the hill. Except for footpaths, the hill itself is largely covered, and I was surprised that when I got to the top to find that the hill was a saddle – there were two hilltops joined by a low area. I have to admit to a certain satisfaction that the Soviets tried to get rid of Christianity, and the hill still stands while the USSR is long gone. “…I will build my church; and the gates of hell shall not prevail against it.”

We then headed into the town of Siauliai, where we will be for two nights. We checked into our hotel, meeting an American named Ryan (or “Red”), who is a defense contractor here. He couldn’t tell me much about what he did, but he had tons of recommendations for the town since he has been here several times. He was most kind.

We walked into the town itself, passing the huge steeple of the Cathedral of Saints Peter and Paul. We headed down a bunch of stairs, passing a number of Communist-era concrete apartment buildings, until we got down to a park area. In the middle was an enormous pillar with a golden archer standing on top – Sundial Square. The 60-foot-high column is part of a huge sundial, which commemorates the 750th anniversary of the city. That’s pretty awesome.

We kept on walking, passing a very pretty lake which had buoys set up for rowing races, and climbed a hill to get to the far side of the center of town. Mer took me back into a housing area to see… Katinų Muziejus – the Cat Museum! A whole museum dedicated to kitties! The museum had over six thousand representations of our favorite felines, from figurines to paintings to toys to mugs. Just as importantly, there were six museum kitties roaming around, although we only saw five of them. Two were very friendly. Good kitties! There was also a small separate room containing some exotic birds and reptiles and other small animals, which was fun, but we all know who the six real stars of the museum are. We spent about an hour there.

We headed back down to the lake, just strolling. Down by the lake was a family park, and like the park in Kaunas, it had workout equipment, a huge playground, outside ping pong tables, wooden lounge chairs, and even a small bike track with banked corners and small bumps to jump over. It seems Lithuanians love their parks and do them very well.

We finished the evening by walking the pedestrian-only main shopping street and getting something to eat in a very cool brick cellar restaurant. We walked back to our hotel by going through a wooded park, which was full of carved wooden sculpture,

In the end, we got everything done today that Meredith had wanted to do, even with the delay, and that delay is what allowed us to have rain-free time at the Hill of Crosses. Sometimes mistakes get made, and those mistakes help make the day.

We left Vilnius behind, and we felt pretty good about our time there. There were a few more things I would have liked to see, but we hit all the big things. We had to get back to the airport to pick up the car, and that went pretty well once we found a backup route to the airport. We missed the quick bus to the airport by a minute (we saw it pull away), and the next one was inexplicably over an hour wait. We walked five minutes to the next stop and got a slower bus.

Getting the car was easy, and getting out on the road was fine. We have a European GPS, so navigating is easy. The car is a six-speed stick shift, and I would have preferred an automatic, but that isn’t too bad. Things were great until we got to suburban Kaunas, which is Lithuania’s second biggest city, with 300,000 people. But let’s go to the country first.

Our first stop was the Rumšiškės Open-Air Museum, which is a folk museum of saved buildings from all across the country. Most date from 1850 to 1930, but there were a few dating back into the 1700s as well. Mer and I like folk museums, and have been to more than half a dozen in Europe and the U.S.

This was a bit of a different experience. We got to the ticket window and got into the museum, but couldn’t see any buildings. I had been handed a map that was in Lithuanian, but did have distances along paths in meters. I couldn’t help but notice that most of the distances between building clusters was marked with hundreds of meters. The place was huge. Ridiculously huge. And the buildings were organized by region (west, southwest, etc.), but even in the regions, the buildings were far apart. I’m not sure if it was to prevent a fire from spreading if it broke out, but it resulted in a lot of walking. I think I had us in at over five miles in the museum, and we only saw about three quarters of the buildings.

That was okay, actually. Meredith had noted in the folk museum in Scotland that the differences in the living spaces of rural people went largely unchanged over hundreds of years. This was true here as well – farmhouses were built of wood in the early 1800s and had thatched roofs, and so did many farmhouse built in 1920. Rich farmers had wooden floors (and one even had wallpaper over the log walls), and poorer farmers had dirt floors.  There were out-buildings for animals and storage, and the grounds around the living houses were tidy and pretty with flowers. Several of the homes were open to visitors, but many we could only see from the outside. We couldn’t talk to any of the docents because they didn’t speak English, so we had fun guessing what things could have been used for, or why things were certain ways. I’m sure we were right, given our vast expertise in nineteenth-century farming techniques.

The most unusual buildings were the two churches – one was a small rural church, and the other was a reconstructed village church, but both were octagonal in shape. I don’t remember seeing that before.

We ate waffles in the 1900s village, where the twelve-year-old girl translated our order to her mother for us. We then headed back to the car. We had spent over three and a half hours at the museum.

And then on to Kaunas. I was trying to get us to Pazaislis Monastery, which is about six miles from the center of town. We were supposed to get there at 3:30, but that would be enough time, since they were open until 5:00. Then, three miles from our destination, we hit stopped traffic. There was road construction, and they were only letting a few cars through, and only every few minutes. After sitting more or less in the same spot for ten minutes, I tried a different route. One that took me through… The Rotary of Death.

On our detour, we had gotten close once again, and had successfully managed several roundabouts (or rotaries, as Mainers call them). No sweat. I came up on a large one, but guessed I had to be in the middle lane of three. Mostly right. The Rotary of Death doesn’t play by normal rules. Three lanes go in. One peels off. I feel smug for being in the right lane. My lane suddenly ends, so I make a quick dash into the inner lane, which is stopped because someone wants to leave The Rotary of Death by going straight out of The Rotary of Death, but that cuts across two new incoming lanes. I cut around that mess when my GPS demands I exit, but that requires cutting across two lanes of traffic. I made the first one, but an incoming car cut me off from the second lane, and I had to abandon the attempt. Then The Rotary of Death channeled me off, so I couldn’t have dreams of going around again.

Needless to say, I was flustered, and pulled into a parking lot that turned out to be for an old fort now stocked with twentieth-century military equipment. Sadly, the fort was closed, but I’d calmed down by the time I read about it and looked at the machines I could see. I determined to give The Rotary of Death one more try, and then to give up if I couldn’t make a NASCAR-style driving maneuver. This time it worked.

Smooth sailing now to the monastery! Oh, right – this is suburban Kaunas. My GPS told me to go left, but the local sign said to go right. My GPS was correct. That required a turnaround a half mile past my turn.

All of which it to say we got to the monastery at 4:15. We still went inside, of course – we had come too far to go back empty-minded. We had to ask at the upscale hotel desk that was in the front hall of the complex where the entrance to the church was, and after a little confusion (“This is not it – you need to go outside”), we were in.

We were checked in by a sweet lady with a high but melodious voice. I told Mer I stopped listening to the words so that I could let the sounds just wash over me, and she agreed. The woman could come home with us and read the sides of our cereal boxes and we’d be happy. The actual monastic complex open to the public was small – two courtyards, the church, and a side hall with a display on the history of the place.

The church was fun – we went in and were confronted with an open hole in the floor, with an uneven staircase into darkness. I went down, of course. Mer followed me when I yelled up that it was okay. It was a crypt, and the kind of one you’d expect with the word “crypt.” There were a couple of holes open in the wall with boards sticking slightly out where there was a carved board where a head would rest. It was clearly for a dead body. What little writing we could make out from the plaster covering the other graves seemed to show that these men died in the 1700s.

The church itself was highly decorated, but not in an over-the-top Baroque sort of way. It had many decorations where the action above, which was usually earthbound (not in heaven), was being seen by us from below, as if we were looking up out of a pit. We hadn’t seen that before except for when looking up into “heaven.” It was a bit unsettling to imagine where were were supposed to be looking up from.

The history of the property was probably interesting, but we had to skim most of it because of time. It seems the monastery went from Catholic men to Orthodox men to Catholic women. Even from some things we read during our couple days in Vilnius, we had guessed that Lithanian has no separate word for “convent” – women, too, lived in a “monastery.”

We left at 5:00 and drove into Kaunas. I’m guessing I had the city’s respect by then, having survived The Rotary of Death, because the drive in wasn’t too bad (one white-knuckle ordinary rotary moment of a sudden stop for a pedestrian). Our hotel has parking, so I left the car in the lot and looked forward to a car-free evening.

After supper, we took a walk through the Old Town of Kaunas. It was smaller than the one in Vilnius, but its main street was wider and filled with restaurants the entire way, which on a Friday felt festive. The main street dumped us into the huge square around the town hall, and again it was alive with people eating outside of restaurants.

I wanted to see the castle remains, so we walked west toward a park. What a park! It had everything, and everything was being used by playing people: many basketball courts, outdoor ping pong tables, a huge playground, a full-sized track, a soccer field, an outdoor workout area with machines, open spaces for picnics, a kiddie playground, and more. There were people everywhere, having a great time.

I saw the castle, but decided to come back to it so that we could walk out to the point of the park where the two rivers of the city met. It was mostly pretty (and there were teens swimming in the river too), but at some point, some shortsighted city planner had built a smokestack right on the other side of the river where the point points. It was still a peaceful spot.

We worked our way back to the castle, which is now really a moat, some half-walls, and one tower. We walked around much of it and even climbed up into the tower to look about. There are seats built facing the moat in a couple of places, so I’m guessing the moat area is used for performances.

With that, we walked back to the hotel, tired but pleased with the day. Tomorrow, Mer takes over for planning, so we’ll see if her day comes together more easily than parts of mine did.

Travel is difficult, and travel is exhilarating. I like my home comforts and routine as much as anyone else, and travel throws that out the window. Strange beds and strange hours and strange foods and strange customs all make normal activities harder. Add in that day three of my European vacations tend to find me at my most tired, and today could have been a long day. But then things happen – good things, unplanned things, delightful things. And that makes up for the hard.

We started the day by heading over to the university quarter of Vilnius to see the school. On the way, I got distracted by a silver and stone shop; I like both silver and stone, and we walked out with some new earrings for Meredith. We got just up to the university area, and I saw the bell tower for St. John’s church, which our guide had recommended. It is the tallest tower in the old town, and, as a bonus, it has an elevator. I decided to get distracted again and go tour it. I was delighted to discover that St. John’s is the church on the university grounds, so I’d found the university as well.

But first, the tower. There was a small museum about the founding of the university and some distinguished scholars from the school. My favorite was a display of a preserved cut-away human head, with the note that the professor of anatomy who’d acquired it was “the head of the department.” That made both me and Mer smile.

We climbed the small set of stairs to the main level, where there was a Foucault’s pendulum, which reassured us the world was still spinning. We got into the elevator and zoomed up to the top level, where there were safely barred windows with good views of the city. Except I saw a dicey-looking set of stairs going up, and I have a compulsion to climb. Up I went. And I found myself on a level with four doors that went outside to a catwalk around the edge of the tower, and two of the doors were wide open. I yelled down to Meredith that she needed to come up, because she loves that sort of thing. She scrambled up the steep stairs and popped out onto the ledge to see what she could see.

Mer wandered slowly around the exterior of the tower while I stayed safely inside. Whenever Mer got to one of the four door openings, she tried to reason with me that the balloon had been much higher. Silly girl. A balloon and a tower are totally different things! How did I know that the tower with its “railing” wouldn’t fail me? I did step out on the ledge to get a picture of Meredith. It was terrifying, and I whimpered loudly the whole time I was dangling out in space before getting back inside the tower where I belonged.

We made our way down to the ground and proceeded to try to find as many of the university’s thirteen courtyards as we could. I think we found five. A couple of them were very pretty, with lots of shade and plants. We also stepped into St. John’s church, which was very very Baroque in all of its gold-and-cherubim glory around and above the altar.

We strolled the short distance from the university back to the Vilnius Cathedral. I wanted to see inside again since it had been a quick pop-in yesterday. We were only inside for a couple of minutes when we heard some very beautiful vocal music, so we went up more into the church and sat down to listen. It turned out to be the start of 12:30 mass. We were there, so we stayed. It was an interesting experience. We aren’t familiar with the Catholic liturgy and certainly don’t know Lithuanian, so we stood when others stood and sat when others sat. There was some really great music, and we thought we caught the rhythms of the Lord’s Prayer being said, as well as some other small parts (like “Have mercy on us” as a response to prayers). It was a pretty great unplanned event for us, and that was fun.

We stopped for a quick snack. It seems that making desserts really beautiful is important here – small cakes are somehow glossed up to have a shiny gloss to the outside. They’re little works of art. We still ate them, of course. It wasn’t the first time, or last, that we noticed how much less sweet European desserts are. They are still good, but often are pleasant instead of decadent.

After fortifying ourselves, we visited the Museum of Church Heritage, which is in an old monastery church. It is a treasury museum, meaning it holds silver and gold and linen objects that were used in worship. Many were very elaborate, and it seems to have been a fashion to beat gold and/or silver into coverings for parts of paintings, so that Mary’s dress would end up being of beaten gold. As far as I could tell, the original painting was complete and the gilding was an afterthought. In my opinion, the plain paintings would probably have been better, but it wasn’t my painting or gold, so my thoughts don’t matter much.

The church items were interesting for us – we like that sort of thing. But we’ve seen a ton of European church art over the years, so what really brought us to the museum was my desire to see the “Scenes of the Easter Prelude.” Back around 1700, churches used paintings and props to tell Bible stories leading up to Easter. They could be coverings for the altar that would be huge, with twenty or more panels of stories. There were also stand-alone figures used to enact the Passion narrative, from Roman guards to Mary to Jesus (both in the tomb and gloriously raised from the dead). We had never seen anything like that in our travels, and so the collection and information about the pieces were excellent.

On the way out, we also found an outdoor installation of artists’ interpretations of the twelve apostles and the scene of Jesus washing the disciples’ feet. Each representation tried to take something from the Bible or from associated legend for each disciple, so that the drawing of Peter had a rooster in it (since he denied Christ before the rooster crowed). One of the most interesting was for Andrew – little is known about Andrew, so the artist did the life of Andrew in eight-bit graphics, like an old video game. The idea was we could see Andrew’s story, but not much detail. It was fun.

More up awaited, so we had to get to that. There is one tower from the city walls that still survives, and that is on top of a hill overlooking the cathedral. It seemed we should go up there, but happily, there is a funicular to get you up the hill. As we went up the hill, a band was doing a soundcheck at the base of the funicular, so we had quite good musical background noise while we toured the tower complex. The views from the top were good, but we didn’t pay to go in the tower itself. We had been nearly as high earlier in St. John’s tower, and we were headed to the Hill of Three Crosses next, which is free to climb and has better views.

We walked down from the tower and about a half mile over to the stairs to get to the Three Crosses. The Three Crosses commemorate when Lithuania converted to Christianity (sometime around 1450, I think). They are three huge white crosses that can be seen from all over the city. They were the last thing visible to me in the old town area when I was in the balloon drifting away from town. We were told the Soviets took them down, but the Lithuanians rebuilt them after the country became independent in the early 1990s.

The views from the Three Crosses were special. You could easily see all of the old town, which you couldn’t see even from St. John’s tower, since it was in the middle of the old town. From the Hill of Three Crosses, you can see all of the streets and red roofs in one panorama. Oddly, there was a different band doing a sound check on the back side of this hill, so both of our hill climbs had bands warming up.

We stayed up on the hill for a fair amount of time – twenty minutes or more – and then made our way back into town. We walked all the way up to the town hall area, where we had supper at an Italian restaurant. On the way back to the hotel, we stopped to get donuts to go, and looked for a place to eat them, but couldn’t find a clean bench.

That was when happy surprise number two happened. As we approached the town hall square, we heard beautiful a cappella music and saw a crowd of people sitting in the square. We sat down and ate our food while a women’s group sang do-wop and swing-style songs in Lithuanian (except for singing “Who Could Ask for Anything More?” in English to finish up their set). And in case you were wondering, Lithuanian women’s a cappella groups also snap their fingers while singing, like every college group I ever saw. Once they were done, the “BigBendas” (big band) took over, playing great swing numbers while featuring a man and a woman as singers. They also did two numbers with an accordion player who was incredible. Oddly, after his two numbers, he hurried off to his nearby van, threw his accordion in the back, and sped away. I guess there was a polka emergency somewhere.

The music was so much fun that we stayed, even though it was in Lithuanian, and even though it began to shower lightly halfway through the concert. It was delightful to see so many people enjoying big band sound being sung in a language only three million people speak. I had a ball, and went home floating. My legs were tired, my feet were sore, and now I really need some sleep, but the delightful things that come from travel, planned or unplanned, are worth the extra effort.