Vilnius 10-14 May, 2019

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It was still light when we arrived in Vilnius at 7.15pm after a slow departure from Riga. A truck had collided with a car, blocking traffic and then our bus narrowly missed a cyclist.

It was a 2.5km walk to our Airbnb but we stopped for groceries along the way arriving at our airbnb 8.20pm.
Our walking legs were getting stronger.
We had a quick briefing by our host and then to our pleasant surprise we were left with the apartment to ourselves as they left to spend the weekend planting tomatoes at their cottage. They left us a bowl of chocolates, hotel slippers and loads of special little extra touches. They were very warm, kind people.

Day 1 was coldish and I did an Alternative tour of Riga in the afternoon mainly looking at street art. Tomas didn't want to come along. The best thing I learnt was in the central market, tasting what looked like a chocolate bar but was in the refrigerator section; a sweet cream cheese chocolate bar in different flavors.  I was definitely having more of those!

In the evening we did more research on what we should see in Vilnius but day 2 (Sunday) when we did an old town tour most of everything we had planned was covered. The day was sunny and perfect and we met a lovely couple from Melbourne travelling mostly obscure countries for a year. They had already been to Armenia and Azerbaijan. There was a "Europe Day" festival in one of the city streets so we wandered around having lunch at an authentic Lithuanian restaurant. Tomas enjoyed the cold beer in the sunshine.

Day 3, Monday, we took a day trip, travelling by bus to an Old Medieval town of Trakai where we did a pretty walk around a lake to a renovated castle. It was a little windy and cold but we found sheltered spots to lie in the grass by the lake's edge. Every time we wanted a little snack we would sample more of the fabulous pastries available

On returning to our airbnb we met the host's daughter who had been working in The Hague and was home until the weekend when she was going to a Eurovision party in Berlin and then was being flown to Paris for work the following week. Least to say that I was envious of her lifestyle.

On our final day we were lucky enough to be able to keep our room for the rest of the day until catching the night bus to Warsaw so used the day to rest up and catch up on ourselves, expecting it might be an exhausting night.
We were on a Lux bus again and it wasn't crowded, so it ended up being quite pleasant with, of course, our own TV screen, entertainment unit, plugs and free hot drinks on board.
Click below for more photos.......

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