The Road to (and from) Doha

They Don't Tear Down Lenin Statues in Belarus The visa on arrival system worked well. You are supposed to buy health insurance for all the days one spends in the country, but the immigration lady was nice enough to just accept our Medicare cards as proof of insurance and we passed quickly to the taxi booth where we were told there were no taxis for what’s close to an hour journey into the city. It seems incomprehensible why they placed the airport nearly 40 miles from town, out in the middle of nowhere, though we were later told that it’s near an important WWII victory site; still……. As for the taxi, we just dashed outside and got lucky enough to find someone to take us into town. The going rate is $30 and that’s what we were charged for what turned out to be a fantastic trip with the driver pointing out dozens of monuments and giving us what was essentially a free tour of the city before we arrived at a lovely apartment just a few subway stops from the center. T...

View from the Skybar Yet another pleasant 3-4 hour bus ride from Riga to Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania. We went back to the Airbnb mode that we will use for much of the trip. Upon arrival, we grabbed an Uber and traveled about 15 minutes across town to our apartment, a nice one bedroom place with a good bed (yay!). The outside of the place looked like a dump, but the owner did a great job restoring the interior. Check in was easy: The key was hidden under a rock outside the front door. Sort of an old school predecessor to the smart locks a lot of people are using now. Like its neighbors, Estonia and Latvia, Lithuania is a proud member of the EU and while Vilnius isn’t quite as developed as Tallinn or Riga, the city seems to be moving in the right direction with a lot of restoration work along with newer buildings going up. THE site to see is the Duke’s Palace, which is a great restoration of an ancient palace; built with EU money, this museum was years in the making with some...

Traveled via a super nice, wifi equipped bus from Tallinn to Riga, the travel industry’s latest “hotspot”. Bus trip took about 4 hours. It is a beautiful city, but there are a lot of beautiful “old town” types of cities in the region and I’m not sure why Riga is “hotter” than Tallinn or Vilnius. It is less expensive than Tallinn, again probably due to Tallinn’s proximity to Helsinki and Tallinn being part of the Helsinki/St Petersburg triangle. Our backs were killing us from the lousy mattress in Tallinn, so we booked an American-style hotel, the Radisson Blu; using the 4 th night free deal on the Citi Prestige card and the points we’ve been accumulating; the total out of pocket for four nights was $60! Our Radisson was more of a boutique hotel and excellent in every way. The next big surprise was around the corner at Lido, a small chain of self-serve restaurants which I immediately renamed Lodi. The place is wildly popular, so the food sits out for minutes, thus is f...