It's Tuesday, we must be in Latvia

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Our whirlwind trip to Riga has come and gone. We arrived in Riga mid-afternoon on Monday, settled into the Grand Palace Hotel and then cruised the cobbled streets of the Old Town and a little beyond the remains of the medieval walls to get our bearings. Riga is a much larger, more cosmopolitan city than Tallinn. Once described as 'the Paris of the East' it is filled with ornate, decorative Art Nouveau architecture, classy boutiques, modern glass shopping centres and poker machines. The latter didn't do much to add to the sophistication of the city but they did remind us of home.

The boys were wistful for the quaint, cobblestoned confines of Tallinn's walled town (or maybe for the beer and rugby they enjoyed there) but I liked the bustle of a bigger city. I'm obviously a city girl at heart. Sadly the cold wet weather caught up with us in Riga. By the end of our organised city tour on Tuesday morning we were scrambling back to our hotel to bundle up in scarves, hats, gloves and wet weather gear. We then set out for the Museum of the Occupation of Latvia to learn more about the country's relatively modern history of Soviet and Nazi occupation.

Of course once there we had to divest ourselves of all of those winter woollies and lug them around with us but we were so absorbed in the exhibition, chronicalling Latvia's history from the first Soviet occupation beginning in 1939, through the Second World War and up until eventual independence in 1991 that we not only forgot our burden but we were the last to leave, hustled out of the door at closing time.

Notes from the tour bus

By Wednesday morning our stay in Riga was over and it was time to board the tour bus and hit the road for the trip from Riga to Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania. The four hour journey took us past miles and miles of flat green fields merging with low grey clouds and road signs warning us to take care or we would turn Rudolph's reindeer mates to road kill.

The boys were cosied up together in the middle row of seats, headphones on and watching a re-run of the Wales v Fiji match downloaded to Pete H's laptop. Jules and I were settled in the back seat, plugged into our iPods. Conversation about our driver's on-road antics on our arrival at a road side coffee stop was animated - "Did you see how he almost side-swiped that car coming out of Riga?" "I was more worried about him falling asleep. At one point we just drifted into the other lane for no reason." Once again we discovered that road travel in Eastern Europe is a risky business. Me? I didn't notice the traffic threats and drowsy driver this time. I was watching the passing fields, forests and farms, thinking about what life would be like if you lived in such a place and listening to my music, turned up loud. Thinking back I've realised already that my memory of the Lithuanian countryside will be of damp, lush, flat land, birch trees, the occasional farmhouse with six sheep and a cow grazing nearby, and a wide, straight freeway, cars whizzing by on either side all set to a Bee Gees soundtrack.

Next up - our last Baltic city, Vilnius, Lithuania. Stay tuned...

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Photos

Riga from above
Check out the weather. No more blue skies...

Art Nouveau in Riga
We spent an afternoon in Riga without noticing any of this. Once our guide pointed in out we spent the remainder of our time in Riga gazing upward

The team on tour
In Riga - one of our few group shots