Part 3 of 3...the Bachelor Party (Roadtrip)

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Sorry to inundate you with 3 blogs over the weekend, but since this trip was broken up into different parts; I figure I would do a few small blogs instead of one big one. And really, I’m just trying to catch you all up on everything. I have actually been solo for about 3 days now in the Ukraine, and the guys are probably on flight home right now. Before I blog about Ukraine, I need to get the last part of the bachelor party trip down.

For some reason we thought the drive from Warsaw to Vilnius would only be about 4 hours. When it took us about 8 hours, we were a little grumpy. Not to mention the Ford wagon was not comfortable and there were photo radars everywhere. The good thing was they put up signs to warn you they were coming. We did see some beautiful things on the drive through the Polish countryside…so not all was lost. But once we got to Lithuania, we figured out that it was the first day of school. They do not sell alcohol on the first day of school. All we wanted after the long drive was a nice cold beer. But no go. We had dinner and were in bed by 9pm. Probably a blessing in disguise.

Vilnius is a great town. We spent a couple days just wandering around, eating, and drinking beer. Couldn’t have asked for a better time. We even got a little culture in at the Genocide Museum. This is actually set up in the old KGB building. Learning about what happened in this country was sobering. It has been passed back and forth from the Polish, Russians, Nazis, Soviets, etc. It’s amazing to see how well the country seems to be doing now. One interesting fact was the statistics on how many people were deported, arrested, killed, etc during the Soviet rule vs. the Nazi rule. The Soviets numbers were pretty spread across the stats…but the Nazis pretty much just killed everyone. Ruthless.

After Vilnius the guys were just going to head straight back to Poland and go to Krakow, but they decided to drive up to Latvia with me for a day. I had to fly out of the Riga. We had a day and night in Riga and we walked around, but we were exhausted. We decided on a pub-crawl after lunch. We hit one bar. Not much of a crawl but all we were capable of.

The guys drove back to Poland, went to Auschwitz, then dropped the car in Warsaw and flew back to Amsterdam for one more night. They should be on their way home now. I flew to Kiev, Ukraine. I am here now getting ready for my flight to L’viv.

Will bring you up to speed on Kiev, Chernobyl, etc shortly.

(the pics on the Amsterdam blog are fixed as well)

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Photos

3 S.B's
Strike a pose

KGB Prison
Told you he'd go to jail

Comments

[Kevin Mazzola]

Latvian Food
Khal Khalash!

[Kevin Mazzola]

Crab Juice