Lithuania

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 astronomical cost overruns. Nevertheless, the four self-guided tours took up the better part of a day and revealed the history of the country from the Stone ages to today. They also had a terrific virtual reality option which showed the entire history in about 8 minutes; man, I was woozy after taking off the goggles, but that was a dollar well spent! We put together another walking tour and it took about two days to properly cover the city.  

 One of the more pleasant surprises was Zappa Square, which features a really well done bronze bust of Frank. Oddly, he never even visited the country, but to my knowledge this is the only such monument to Zappa in the world.
Dinner at Loky's.

Pub Grub at Aline, Home of Some Great Craft Beers
Lithuanian cuisine isn’t much different from their neighbors’, so we ate some Chinese, some sushi. That didn’t stop us from enjoying some great craft beers and we did squeeze in a meal of delicious wild game at a very fancy place (Lokys). We ate early that evening and had the entire, beautiful dining room to ourselves. I enjoyed the wild boar and venison sausage, but was hesitant to eat beaver (please, no jokes here!) which the locals seem to consider a delicacy while research indicated that it would taste fishy and generally only include the tail. Maybe another time.





The final full day was spent shopping for linens for Sharon. I’m not at all a shopper when I travel….unless I find some oddball shirt in a second hand store. We ended our final day atop a hill in the Skybar at the Radisson, which was only a few minutes walk from our place. Lovely views.

The next day we headed out to the airport for our journey to Minsk, Belarus. Although the bus would have been an easy option, the Belarussian government pretty much forces visitors to only fly in and out of Minsk, where a visa on arrival is available. The entire flight took less than 30 minutes.

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