Heading to the Baltics!

It’s true, as many of you point out, that I’m always planning complicated trips that take us out of the US for weeks at a time. But my heart is tied forever to the Pacific Northwest, where I happily remain all summer, taking walks that include the amazing Puget Sound view you see above. For all of my travels, I have never found a landscape I love more than my hometown.

But the days are getting shorter and it’s starting to rain here and so I know it’s time to pack up and head out. Next week we leave for our first trip to the Baltic countries. The trip looks like this:

We’re starting down in Strasbourg for 5 nights, meeting up with some of our absolute favorite travel buddies ever – Kris and Jim, who either never get tired of being lost in Europe with us or haven’t figured out a polite way to avoid us.

Then we’re taking the train to Nuremberg so we can catch a flight to Vilnius. In Vilnius, we are joining an Overseas Adventure Travel tour of Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, and Finland. We’re finishing with a week in London on our own.

My planned highlights for the trip are these:

  • A day trip to Nancy, France to see their art nouveau museum and architecture
  • More art nouveau architecture in Riga, Latvia!
  • For variety’s sake, the modernist architecture of Helsinki! (Note to those of you shaking your heads at my architecture obsession, given my career and training as a criminal defense attorney: Just you wait – come January, I’m hauling Ron around Mexico for two weeks in search of my beloved whales, which are similarly unrelated to criminal defense.)
  • The Churchill War Rooms in London
  • Bletchley Park – the code-breaking museum outside of London, where Alan Turing worked decoding intelligence during WWII
  • I’ve scored us tickets to two evening plays in London – Phantom of the Opera and Wicked. Ron keeps pointing out that of the two evening events I “scored” tickets for on this past Germany trip, we attended zero of them (Dresden: seats so high up we got dizzy and had to leave and Berlin: I decided to get into my pajamas instead of attending the concert). I do not know what point he is trying to make.
  • Helping Ron keep track of the phone he lost two hours into the last trip, which arrived home 28 days later, after routing itself through Paris, Seattle, Paris, Atlanta and then Seattle.

I’ll leave you with this picture and talk to you in about a week. It’s the Oodi library in Helsinki, just so you can see what I’m so excited about:

11 thoughts on “Heading to the Baltics!”

  1. My wife and I did the Baltics. It was great. When they touted Riga as the “Paris of the Baltic,” I always wondered if that made Paris the “Riga of the Seine?” Anyway, don’t miss the local yellow potatoes 😋. Have fun and keep posting.

    Oh, that photo: Either a cool, modern building or a submarine.

    😘 Stan

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  2. Loved your first blog for this trip. Sounds like you are in for a fabulous time. We were in Strasbourg about 2 weeks ago, loved it. Stan wrote it up in his blog. We saw the Churchill War Rooms in London, terrific. Have fun, xx to Kris and Jim too.

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  4. Love your itinerary, keep posting logistics since I seem to follow in your foot steps often! We just miss you in London by a week, so we need to plan our travels together more carefully! Lucky Kris & Jim to meet up with you guys!

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      1. I am and thank you! I would wish for that but probably not this year. I’m leaving for Tuscany Oct. 13, then Andalusia the end of May and Africa Nov 2024. OMG that trip is so out of my comfort zone and I’m happy to venture there! Yeah, I like to plan ahead, too. I’m looking forward to your glorious photos and beautifully descriptive prose. I think you’ll love Tallinn. I understand booking events and then not going. I’ve done that a time or two myself. Sometimes you just have to weigh the pros and cons……..Have a great time; I know you will! PS I hope you bought Ron a phone leash!

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