New shorelines, new seas, new rivers running through me

After a sleepy taxi ride to the airport through the slumbering streets of Vilnius, an early-morning Ryanair flight that left miraculously on time, and an (even more miraculous) sail through Stansted, we arrived home before midday, to a hot, stuffy house, and a dry and feral garden that had somehow managed to not just survive two weeks without us, but also to grow fruit and vegetables in astonishing abundance. (Benign neglect is clearly the way to go with this garden!) Matthias and I have spent the past two weeks on holiday in the Baltic countries — a whirlwind tour that took us through eight cities (or rather six cities and two small towns) in four countries (moving at such a pace at the beginning that we spent the first seven nights of the trip in seven different hotels). This is the longest we've ever been away apart from trips back to visit my family in Australia, where we essentially stay put, so it was very exhausting — but well worth it!

The reason for the whole trip was the wedding of one of Matthias's school friends, who lives in Finland and was getting married to his Finnish fiancée; we decided that this was the perfect opportunity to add a visit to Tallinn, and then decided that when would we next have the chance to be in that part of the world, and added on some time in Latvia and Lithuania as well! We did the whole thing (other than the flights at either end) via public transport: ferry, trains (and an unintended rail replacement bus), which was logistically complicated (especially the trains between Estonia and Latvia, and Latvia and Lithuania, of which there are only one per day on each respective route), but a great experience.

Since I always regret not doing so when travelling, I put pen to paper every day with a few sentences in my paper journal, so I'd remember all the various things we did. I'm very happy to expand on anything noted here, especially if you are considering visiting the same places and want advice or recommendations.

( On the worldroad )

And that about sums it up. That was a lot of transcribing, so I'm going to ignore any typos that I discover later! I feel really fortunate to have had such experiences, and particularly appreciate that Matthias and I are such keen walkers, since it allows for a kind of sponteneity and serendipitous discovery that balances well with my own impulses to plan and schedule everything to a rigid degree. Walking means you can revel in the unexpected, encountered en route to the planned activities!

I have a few final impressions of the trip and region as a whole, but I will leave that to another post — but as I say, I'm happy to expand on anything mentioned here in the comments! I also have extensive photographic documentation of everything documented in writing above, over at Instagram (ronnidolorosa, where I'm always happy to be added by people from Dreamwidth, although give me a heads up if your username there is different to your Dreamwidth one, otherwise I won't add you back).