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.