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.