Pretirement

There are many times so far on this trip that the Lonely Planet has led us astray. First was the day trip to the Russian missile silo that has been closed for the past two years. Next, a promise of a beachside restaurant that, if visited during berry season, would serve us a ticket to “gastronomic heaven” – but turned out to serve us just pancakes stuffed with cheese curd, no berries in sight. There was the restaurant “worth the trip out of town” that had been closed for so long there were weeds growing from under the door, and the “coolest teahouse ever” that appeared not to exist. But one place mentioned by the guide book actually exceeded expectations: a restored manor house south of Kandava, where the owner’s “piece de resistance is [his] made-to-order dinner menu, which caters to very guest’s whim and only features locally grown organic produce.”

After two weeks of potatoes and pig ears, this sounded like true gastronomic heaven – so we programmed the restaurant into the GPS and planned our itinerary specifically so that we could stay in a nearby village for the night. We’d spent the previous two days in Kuldiga, a charming town where we’d had the misfortune of arriving in a rainstorm — leading us to agree, out of drenched desperation, to stay the night in the only Soviet-era hotel in town. (As the Lonely Planet rightly pointed out, the bathrooms had not been renovated since the Russians left in 1991.) We spent several days tooling around Kuldiga, including a misguided excursion to a local sand cave where I realized, as soon as we entered the narrow subterranean passageway on a 20-person tour given entirely in Latvian, that caves make me claustrophobic (go figure).

Please get me out of here.

So we were excited for our 70 km ride to Kandava. En route, we stopped by Renda, a small town noted by Lonely Planet for its organic garden (which we couldn’t find) and dropped by Sabile, home of the world’ northermost vineyard. (You can only taste the wine during the yearly wine weekend – which that weekend happened to be – but all the wine had been drunk the day before.)

Sabile was also home to a weird open-air art museum.

We arrived at Kandava just before a thunderstorm, and upon learning that the restaurant was 10 km away on an unpaved road, made a clever arrangement with the inn’s bartender to have someone drive us there. It was a brilliant move. Our chauffeur – a guy in Umbros and a backwards baseball cap named Boris – picked us up as scheduled, and, after 10 kilometers on the gravel equivalent of a washing board, dropped us off in front of a mansion in the middle of nowhere. “I think this is it?” he said, as we pulled into the driveway of a yellow stucco building backed by a private lake.

It was indeed. Inside, a young man – whose name turned out to be Ivars – was giving a tour to a group of open-shirted, mustacho’ed men. He fetched Daniel, the owner of the mansion who also was its cook, whom we’d been speaking with on the phone. True to Lonely Planet’s description, Daniel greeted us by asking what we felt like eating that night.

Peter didn’t know this, but I’d actually been thinking about the answer to that question since lunch, when I’d eaten an artery-clogging fried egg sandwich at a weird open-air art museum in Sabile.

“Fish!” I announced decisively, before he had a chance to think.

“Fish it is,” said Daniel, and instructed Ivars – who clearly preferred giving tours in his native tongue – to explain the house to us in English. Ivars, a neatly dressed, gay-seeming young man with a small stud in one ear, sheepishly obliged, telling us he was “shy” before proudly showing off a case of crystal glasses and a set of living room chairs with golden arms carved to look like swans.

It didn’t take long for us to become quite enamored of Ivars, whose English was actually quite good, and who had the cute habit of asking for new words when his vocabulary faltered. I never knew that one could bond over “tapestry” and “last will and testament,” but by the end of the tour  we had moved beyond 18^th century furniture to the subject of Ivars’s personal life. How had he ended up here, as the guide and maitre’d to this estate?

It turned out that Ivars and I had more in common than would at first appear – for before working at the mansion, he had been an inspector for Latvian wastewater treatment plants. In fact, he still gave lectures on environmental responsibility twice a week to local schoolchildren. “No kidding!,” I said.  I had spent a year working on an article about American wastewater treatment plants — we had so much to discuss!

It’s important to note here that Ivars was about as unlikely a candidate for a wastewater treatment plant inspector as could be imagined – a fact that he owned up to himself. “My boss, he was always teasing me,” he explained, as we stood in the foyer underneath a glittering chandelier and a wall hanging known in Latvian by a word that sounded like “goblin.”

“I was supposed to be stern, you know, when I delivered the . . .” he paused.

“Fines?” I suggested.

“Yes. Fines. But instead,” Ivars grinned impishly, “I was always smiling.” He wagged his finger at us with mock opprobrium. “For this . . . violation? Five hundred lats!”

But before I could ask him more – what kind of wastewater treatment plants were there in Latvia? Did they have secondary treatment systems? Tertiary? – it was time for dinner.

Effortlessly switching from wastewater enforcer to host, Ivars led us to a bright blue dining room decorated with water buffalo horns and presented us with a basket of warm bread and a bottle of sauvignon blanc. As for the meal itself? Suffice it to say that it was indeed a slice of gastronomic heaven – homemade goulash followed by a salad with the “special dressing of the chef” (it involved strawberries), then trout garnished with local chanterelles, then a break to tour the upstairs of the mansion (see photos) and finally, a dessert to end all desserts, fresh strawberries, raspberries and blueberries with some sort of vanilla cream concoction that left Peter saying it was the best dessert he had ever had.

“This cream, it is from our neighbor’s cow – it is very fresh,” said Ivars, using code-speak for “it is not pasteurized.” We nodded in approval – hell, we just came from a dairy farm where we drank milk straight out of an udder. Ivars smiled, our bond sealed.

“Good,” he said. “Because some city people – they do not like this kind of milk. You know, from Riiga.” He stretched out the name of the Latvian capital – clearly the home of germaphobic snobs. None of those at the estate tonight! If Boris hadn’t been waiting, I would have hugged him.

Peter making himself at home.

At the end of the evening, Boris met us in the driveway and took us back to the guesthouse, where we collapsed into well-deserved sleep.But heaven can only last for so long and the next morning, the guesthouse’s complimentary breakfast jolted us back to earth: a plate of shredded cheese and sliced tomatoes, slathered in a mixture of ketchup and sweet cream and – for good measure – garnished with a flower.

This old thing?

We loved everything about this.

Shredded cheese with ketchup sauce. Make it stop.

Ever since my travel book, 101 Places Not To See Before You Die, came out in June, I’ve been fielding a lot of questions about what criteria I used to pick the entries on the list. I got a very sweet email from the marketing director for the Blarney Stone, for example, asking if I were aware that there were many pleasant attractions at Blarney Castle beyond the stone itself and, besides, I didn’t need to worry about kissing the same stone kissed by hundreds of thousands of people, because it was cleaned each night. How was it cleaned? She couldn’t divulge the secret. But she did emphasize that the truly germaphobic visitor could ask for a special cleaning before their smooch. (I’m sure that’s a way to ingratiate yourself to the hundreds of people behind you in line.)

I fielded similar questions about Mt. Rushmore and, bizarrely, late night at Chicago’s Wiener Circle, where people engage in the charming pass-time of eating hotdogs while hurling racist slurs at each other. But despite my confidence in my own personal need not to visit these places, I felt a little bad about criticizing them, especially those I’d never visited myself.

So earlier this week, when Peter and I found ourselves in Liepaja, Latvia for two hours (we were waiting for a bus transfer) I knew there was something I needed to do.

One of the entries in the book is titled “Any Hotel That Used To Be A Prison,” and it focuses on Karostas Cietums prison in, you guessed it, Liepaja, Latvia. Or, more precisely, Karostas — a suburb of Liepaja that used to be a soviet military base but is now a crumbling neighborhood north of the city proper marked by wide boulevards and regal buildings in various states of decay. So despite our limited time — not to mention ominous gray skies overhead — Peter and I grabbed our bikes and headed north, stopping en route at St. Nicholas’s cathedral, an orthodox church next to some Soviet-style apartment buildings that said Soviets turned into a movie theater and, bizarrely, a sporting center (now it’s back to its original purpose).

It took longer to bike to Karostas Cietums than we’d anticipated (what do you know, most military prisons aren’t located in the center of town) and by the time we finally arrived at its imposing metal gate, we only had time for a quick photograph before heading back to the bus.

I ran quickly inside the gate to see if I could find out any more details for the road, and found a man standing by the door wearing a guard’s outfit, smoking a cigarette. In addition to an official-looking cap, he sported the sort of mustache that parents teach children to run away from — which was fitting since, as I explain in the entry for the book, the “guards” at Karostas Cietums are no ordinary prison docents. Part of their job is to act like they actually *are* guards, and subject you to verbal and faux-physical abuse — sort of like a sadistic version of Colonial Williamsburg. So I was a little worried to go up to the guy and ask for an informational brochure — let alone inquire about the so-called night time “surprise tour” that required signing something known as The Agreement. (For more information, check out their site — warning, there are gun shots.)

Luckily, this guard was actually just selling tickets. “You want tour?” he asked in a thick accent, holding the cigarette between his lips.

“Yes,” I said, “But I do not have time. Do you have information?” He looked at me quizzically. “Maybe a pamphlet?”

I glanced inside, but found nothing but a rack of fake rifles. The guard shook his head. “Only tour.”

“Okay, then, never mind!”

I jogged back to Peter and, after a brief moment of indecision — we had just enough time to make it to the bus if we biked quickly, we hopped back on our bicycles and started pedaling toward the station.

It only took me about 2 seconds to feel regret. I mean, come on. I was in Liepaja, Latvia, mere *steps* away from one of the places I had written about. What use was it to merely stand outside? What story comes from “I biked all the way to Karostas Cietums . . . and all I got was this lousy photograph?” No story. None at all.

One of the many reasons Peter is so wonderful to me is that he picks up on such emotions, even when they are behind him on a bicycle. We got to the bridge leading back to town when he made a hand signal indicating that he was stopping.

“Are you cultivating regret?” he asked.

“Uh huh.”

“Let’s go back.”

And so we did, trying to ignore the irony of not just going, but returning to a place supposedly not worth seeing.

Leaving our bikes outside, we raced into the dark building, and caught up with our tour guide (tour guard?) just as he was putting on a gas mask.

He stopped what he was doing to collect our 2 lat entry fee, then gave us a quick run-down of what we had missed so far. The gist? This was not a normal prison; it was a place to punish bad soldiers (not criminals or political prisoners). This statement was repeated back to us numerous times, in the form of call and response — “And why were there no beds in the cells?”

“Because this was not a normal prison.”

“Very good.”

Our guard did not appear to care that this answer did not actually make sense. Instead, he recited facts about the various militaries that had used the compound — the Latvians, the Nazis, the Soviets, and the Latvians again (it was finally shut down when Latvia decided it might like to join the EU) — and explained the tenants’ daily routines: one hour of political study, three or four hours of running around in the courtyard, often wearing gas masks and/or pushing baby strollers full of bricks, more hours of work, and then a relaxing six hours’ rest in a small cement cell shared with ten other inmates.

“And after you stay here, two weeks, maybe three, you are re-educated,” said the guard, making me think for a moment that maybe it wasn’t so bad — unlike some of the other former prisons we’ve visited, he hadn’t mentioned any actual torture. Maybe this was more like a military retreat where you worked on your aerobic conditioning while studying up on propaganda before being released back into your normal life.

“Or, also, you could be shot,” he continued. “But not here. In forest across street. Follow me.”

As the tour continued, it quickly became apparent that our guide particularly enjoyed:

1. Rhetorical questions posed to us individually that had answers none of us would ever be able to provide. (“Who is this?” he asked, pointing at a portrait of Lenin and then at me. “Lenin?” I tried. “No!” said the guard. “Your best friend!”)

2. Referring to various rooms in the prison as “beautiful.” Sometimes this was combined with habit #1: “And what is this room?” he asked, in front of a closed door. “A beautiful toilet!”

3. Picking on me. “And so you each have five days of ‘education,'” he said, checking to make sure that we didn’t have our hands in our pockets — a prison no-no. “For you,” he said, pointing at me. “Maybe seven.”

Luckily, our tour was not a “reality tour” — one of the prison’s more popular programs in which the guards really do pelt you with abuse — and so the guard stayed safely on the side of being playful rather than terrifying. Nonetheless, it wasn’t hard to imagine him relishing the idea of chaperoning an overnight stay at the prison, which offers guests the opportunity to sleep on wooden planks on the floor. (Unpleasant, but a better choice than spending the night in pitch-black solitary confinement, which is another option offered.)

I will not be sleeping here tonight.

At the end of the tour, the guard finally offered us the opportunity to ask questions of our own — and then didn’t actually answer them. “So what led you to be the captain at this prison?” asked Peter, hoping to elicit some explanation for why a presumably sane guy would take a job as a faux-sadistic prison guard (then again, unemployment is high). Misunderstanding the question, he instead protested against Peter’s use of title. “I am not captain,” he insisted. “I am guard.”

Just before the tour ended, the sky erupted with a crash of thunder and rain began pelting down — leaving us with the unsavory options of biking through a downpour or staying in Karostas Cietums, whose unlit hallways and dank cells became no less creepy when illuminated by lightning.

As we contemplated our options, Peter glanced out the window and noticed that, given where we’d placed our bicycles, we might as well suck it up and head into the storm.

We couldn't have placed this better if we'd tried. (Note the crowd in the background.)

And so we did, arriving at the bus station dripping wet to discover that the next bus didn’t leave for another two and a half hours. Luckily, no one seemed to mind us pulling our bikes into the departure hall and sipping powdered cappuccino mix while waiting for our pants to dry — so that’s exactly what we did.

Would I visit Karostas Cietums again? If I happened to be in Liepaja with a bicycle, a clear weather forecast and several hours to spare? Why not — it was interesting.

But there’s still no way in hell I’d stay the night.

Here is what the Lonely Planet guidebook has to say about the abandoned nuclear missile site in Zemaitija National Park:

“Deep in the forests of Zemaitija National Park resides a former secret Soviet underground missile base that once housed nuclear missiles with enough power to destroy most of Europe. . . . Tours, which take about 30 minutes, explore the heart of the base: you see the control room, heating room, enormous diesel engine used to power the place and, most disturbing of all, one of the 27m-deep silos where a warhead once stood ready. It is cold underground so bring a warm jumper. Sturdy shoes are also recommended; 30 years of abandonment renders the bat-infested site hazardous.”

Considering that we’re a. supposed to return our bicycles to a shop in northernmost Estonia on August 1^st and, b. we’re still in Lithuania, we’re a little pressed for time. But how often does one get to see abandoned missile silos, let alone ones that are infested by bats? We decided the detour was worth it, and woke up early yesterday morning to take a day trip to Plunge, a town about 25 kilometers south of the national park where the base was hidden.

Thanks to a local cycle map, we knew that there was an untrafficked way to get between Plunge and the park. We hopped off the bus, got onto our bikes, set out for the road . . . and discovered it was unpaved. Not like, unpaved in a hard-packed dirt kind of way (those aren’t too hard to ride on). Not even unpaved in a random-pockets-of-wheel-catching-sand way (those can be treacherous but are manageable). This road had occasional sand patches, but worse, it was ridged. You know the rumble strips on the sides of the highway, which are designed so that their vibration will jolt you awake if you start to veer off the road? They were kind of like that, except much bigger, bumpier, unavoidable, made of gravely dirt, and were on a shadeless road that was eight kilometers long. There weren’t many cars, but the few that did roll by left behind large clouds of lingering dust. Needless to say, I was eager to get to the park.

Once we were on paved road, the route took us through beautiful pine forests, between sparkling lakes, and past innumerable signs for guest houses. We had planned to ask for help from the park information office, but after passing a guesthouse on a shore of a particularly attractive lake, at the edge of which we could see a row boat and a swimming pier, we decided to stop, you know, and just see if they might have a room.

They did. What’s more, it was cheap, it was cool inside, there was a shared kitchen, a lovely yard and, oh, wait, according to the friendly English-speaking owner, a woman from a local hospital was coming by that evening to give massages to the guests. “They are 20 litas, maybe 30,” she said. “Not much at all. You want, she can give to you, too.”

Oh, we wanted. Convinced we had discovered paradise on the side of a Lithuanian road, we dropped off our bags and biked the remaining six kilometers into town, plotting what the fastest possible route would be between abandoned missile silos and our bathing suits. Our guidebooks had warned us that we needed to make arrangements for an English-speaking guide, so we popped into the National Park information office, where a friendly, English-speaking park employee informed us that the missile site was closed.

You mean like, for the day? No. For two years. Apparently they are “renovating it” (one hopes not too much) and turning it into a Cold War museum. Interesting – and relevant – information that would have been even more useful had we known it say, before we took a two-day detour to a random Lithuanian lake town. Now, given the guesthouse situation, I wasn’t complaining too much (in reality, a refreshing swim sounded great). But I would like to point out to the research team at Lonely Planet and Rough Guide that if you come out with a brand-new version of your guidebook (published in 2010 and 2009 respectively) and you have a half-page feature about a particular site in an otherwise unremarkable location that is a pain in the ass to get to, you might want to check to see if it’s still open. I know their manuscript deadlines were probably a while back, but the museum isn’t scheduled to open till the fall of 2011 – unlike the original existence of the base, I don’t think its closure was kept secret.

But anyway. We recovered from our pseudo-sorrow by buying groceries at a local shop, stopping for gross gyros on the side of the road (dear Lithuania: sometimes it’s okay to not put sugar in your garlic yogurt dressing), and then high-tailing it back to paradise. The lake lived up to its promise – we floated around happily for a half hour before retreating to our room for a quick shower before our other mandatory activity of the day: our massages.

Peter went first, and when he returned, the look on his face told me that something had not gone according to plan. (No, not like that! This woman was a nurse!)

“How was it?”  I asked. “And why were you only gone fifteen minutes?”

“It was an hour-long massage squeezed into fifteen minutes,” he said. And then, in response to my questioning look, “You’ll see.”

Now wary, I found the woman waiting for me in the main area of the guest house, a massage table set up at the head of the room. She, speaking about as much English as I speak Lithuanian, motioned for me to take off my shirt and lie down. I gestured toward my shoulders and back and she nodded. Then she grabbed a bottle of baby oil.

As soon as she began the “massage,” I knew immediately what Peter had meant. You know how Swedish massages are always described as having long, smooth strokes? This was not a Swedish massage. The woman took to my back like I was a piece of particularly dirty laundry that needed to be scrubbed. First, she ran her hands up and down my back, quickly and hard, spreading the oil around as she summoned the first of many rushes of blood to the surface of my skin. Next, she switched to her knuckles, running them up, down, and occasionally over my spine, using the same quick back and forth motions you’d use to get out a tough stain. The massage table creaked from side to side as she worked; from my face-down vantage point, I could see the ground shift beneath me. Who was this woman? I wondered. And what kind of nurse? I suppose I could see this “massage” technique being a good way to increase the circulation of bed-ridden patients, but I couldn’t believe that they enjoyed it. I imagined my white-clad assailant as a sort of Nurse Ratched patrolling the halls, bottle of baby oil in hand, as her victims cowered in their beds. “No, please! Not my daily massage!”

Or maybe that’s just what was going through my head – for the first time in my life, I was actually yearning for the massage to be over. She had moved on from her laundry work to a quick up and down the spine sweep that reminded me – in speed and technique – to a pizza cutter slicing through a pie. Up, down. Up, down. My neck, which had been mildly tense, was now rigid, achieving approximately the same degree of relaxation one would expect to have if anticipating being rubbed with a sharp blade. Just when I thought I might have to actually excuse myself from my massage, she stopped what she was doing and paused, hands in the air. And then? Hitting!

It says something about the massage that being pummeled by her fists was actually the most enjoyable part of the treatment – but unfortunately, it didn’t last. Instead, she went for a finishing round of briskly rubbing my back with the palms of her hand as if trying to start a fire. My spine was aching; my skin felt like it was developing rug burn. When she finally finished — indicated by a slightly lighter touch and something chirpy in Lithuanian, I leapt off the table as if recoiling from a hot stove.

This morning, when I got up and touched my back while applying sunscreen, I noticed that my upper spine is bruised. I’m glad I tried my Lithuanian spa treatment, but I think I agree with what Peter said when he returned to the room after his massage: “Fifteen minutes is long enough.”

The guest house had a rowboat.

And the rowboat attracted swans.

Mean swans.

Yes!

Traveling always requires a certain comfort with uncertainty. You can plan all you want, but there’s always something  unexpected that happens – say, your luggage gets misplaced in a Latvian airport – and if you don’t find the humor in it (or at least obsessively blog about it), then you’re setting yourself up to not have a good time.

I’m used to that general idea. But this section of our trip – the whole “biking through the Baltic States” part of the itinerary – is an entirely different level of unknowns. First was the question of whether, after my lengthy email exchanges with a mysterious Vilnius man named Frankas (and his colleague in Talinn, Toomas), we would actually have bikes waiting for us upon our arrival in Lithuania. Once that had happened, we had to drop off our luggage – the very luggage I had worked so hard to retrieve from Baltic Air – at the office of a company called Cargo Bus, so that they could deliver it to Toomas, who was to hold onto it until our arrival in Estonia. (Nothing encourages confidence like arranging for a package delivery with someone with whom you don’t share a language.) I was already reciting comforting lost-bag adages to myself (“If you love something, let it go. . . .”) but by the following day, Toomas had emailed us to say that it had arrived. Next was the question of how to take Frankas’s lovingly written – and completely incomprehensible – bike guide and translate it into how to actually get out of Vilnius.

Et cetera, et cetera. It’s been about a week on the road (the biking road, that is), and we’re at a point where we have no idea where we’re staying tonight, and . . . I’m not really worried. Take yesterday, for example. We’d spent the previous afternoon in Nida, a small village at the very tip of the Curonian Spit (a narrow tongue of land and sand that extends off of Lithuania’s west coast, and touches that bizarre Russian outpost on the Baltic, Kaliningrad). We’d arrived there with no place to stay as well, but within five minutes of arriving in town, we’d met a local woman, dressed entirely in blue with a white purse, who offered us a room in her apartment. Whereas that’s the kind of offer one would never say yes to in, say, New York, in Lithuania, that’s just how things are. From what I can gather, there are plenty of reasons to be happy that the Baltics are no longer occupied by the Red Army. But from a tourist’s perspective, capitalism is a big one, since it encourages locals to start cottage B&B industries out of, well, their cottages. And so, after inspecting the woman’s apartment – which was quite nice, and relatively cheap – we dropped off our stuff and spent the rest of the afternoon tooling around the Curonian lagoon, checking out the dunes and – most amusingly – some guys who were charging people 10 litas to spend ten minutes floating around in a giant inflatable gerbil ball.

Is it just me, or is there something existential about this picture?

We watched the sun set at a waterside cafe, and the only blemish on an otherwise perfect afternoon was Peter’s decision to sample another local delicacy: smoked pig ears.  (At least he didn’t get the trotters?)

You can’t see it in this photo, but some of them still have hair.

The next morning we set off biking our way back up the spit, 60 kilometers or so on a lovely paved path through the woods and dunes to Klaipeda, where again we didn’t have a place to stay. (Lest this seem overly carefree, I should point out that we actually did try to call a hostel, but our phone didn’t have any reception – that’s what you get for buying the cheapest SIM card you can find.) But no problem. That’s what tourist offices are for – and we soon were being led down the street by a hyperactive woman named Irena, on her way home from the market with a large plastic bag of nothing but cucumbers, who rented her spare bedroom to guests from out of town.

As we hurried behind her, she yammered at us in a combination on Lithuanian, German (Klaipeda used to be a German town) and the occasional word of English. “You live here!” was one of the more understandable sentences she said, pointing at a street sign next to what turned out to be her house. We followed her up several flights of stairs to take a look at her apartment – and immediately realized that we had lucked out. She lived on the top floor of a three-story walkup, a light and airy wood-floored apartment with family photographs on the walls and skylights open to let in the breeze. Our room was large and comfortable, a small vase with two roses set on a coffee table next to a wraparound couch and wooden built-in shelves stocked wtih books. We set down our bags and tried to thank her, but Irena was not about to let her hospitality end there.

“Bitte, bitte!” she said, gesturing for us to follow her to the bathroom – where she showed us how to turn on the shower and explained that the water took a while to heat up, then left the faucet running while she beckoned us back to the bedroom to make sure we understood that there were blankets in the corner in case we got cold, then back to the bathroom, where she grabbed a bucket of water from the floor of the tub and took it – and us – to the kitchen, where she tossed the bucket onto a small balcony, grabbed some laundry off of the line hanging outside and sniffed it before pulling open the freezer and frantically gesturing toward several water bottles that sat frozen beneath tupperware containers of frost-bitten dill.

“You! For biking! Hot! Put here!” she said, explaining (I think?) that we were to put our bottles of water into the freezer so that we would have cold beverages for the next day. “And here! Food!” she opened the refrigerator. “Coffee. Tea. Drink! You!”

Over to the sink: “No good!” she said, gesturing toward the regular faucet. “Here, good!” she said, showing us a special faucet with distilled water. “Here! More!” Over to the fridge again to show us a bottle of cold water, presumably from the distilled tap. “You!  Finished biking. Have martini!”

She now grabbed a bottle of a dark brown liquid from the shelf next to the water bottle, took out three glasses and put a little of it on the bottom of each before filling the glasses up with chilled water. “Welcome!”

"Martini"? Don't mind if I do!

And with that, she gestured us back to our room, where we sipped our “martinis” and changed out of our sweaty bike clothes as Irena rushed around the apartment, then ran out (“I be back, 10 o’clock!”) to see her son.

Still recovering from our Irena whirlwind, we relaxed for a while, before suddenly loud pop music began to waft up at us from somewhere outside the window. What was it? A public dance class? I peered outside and discovered that, of all the places we could have stayed in Klaipeda, we were directly across the street from an aerobics studio. Through its open window I could see a room full of spandex-clad women with plastic bands around their legs squatting to the remix of “Forever Young.” As most people who know me are aware, I love aerobics classes, especially in foreign countries – and if we had not already biked 60 kilometers that day, I would have been over there in a heartbeat. But as it was, I simply stood at the window, sipping cold water as I watched them sweat.

This morning, we awoke to find Irena in the kitchen, busily making us pancakes for breakfast (“Peter! Katrin! Bitte!”), which we ate as she scurried around the apartment across the hall, which she also rents. When we left for the bus station, she pressed a business card into my hand and bid me farewell with a kiss. The next time you’re in Klaipeda, Irena Kraniauskiene is your woman. (+370 680 58165 – you won’t regret it.)

And then, it was back to the uncertainty. At the bus station, despite having checked the bicycle situation at the tourist office yesterday, the woman at the counter informed me that she couldn’t sell me a ticket – we had to check with the driver himself to see if he were willing to take us. Sounds to me like a good set-up for a bribe, and we would have been a little screwed if the guy had said  no – but we waited patiently at platform 4, and when the bus arrived, the driver let us (and our bicycles) on without so much as a grumble.

And so here we are, somewhere between Klaipeda and Plunge, trying to go to a national park where, in addition to a gorgeous lake, you can see old nuclear missile silos left behind by the Russians. (This is likely to be more creepy than cool, but I still think it’ll be interesting.) We’re not sure where we’re staying, or how exactly to get to the park – but I’m confident something will work out.

Look, Dad -- no cars!

The Baltic Sea

The dunes at Nida, looking toward Kaliningrad

Happy in Klaipeda

When I was making the reservations for our bicycles, I decided to include a GPS system as an afterthought.  Granted, a Garmin system once guided me through Los Angeles traffic without harm, and for that, I will forever be grateful. But come on – we’re on bicycles. It’s not like it’s hard to pull over when you’re lost. We have maps. We would have had a cycle computer. Did we really need to fork over an extra 25 euros per week for a handheld device that would tell us our precise location on the globe?

Answer: Yes. Yes we did. Peter has been doing most of the route navigation so far, and I think it’s safe to say that were it not for the GPS, we’d be stuck in a field somewhere outside Lake Trakai. Not because Peter is a poor navigator – far from it – but because our biking maps are, to put it mildly, fucking confusing.

I'm sorry . . . what?

Adding to the difficulty, Lithuanian roads are, well . . . let’s just say that the quality varies. We just finished cycling between the capital, Vilnius, and Lithuania’s second-largest city, Kaunas (it’s only 100 or so kilometers on the map, but our route was closer to 225), most of which was on pleasant, paved roads without too much traffic. After all, there aren’t many highways in Lithuania, and there are a ton of small roads. But if you look closer at a map of the country, you’ll notice that while some of the roads show up as red, many of them appear in shades of yellow. And if you look even closer, at the key that defines the meaning of these colors, you will see that yellow indicates an “unpaved surface.”

This is where the GPS comes in — there have been some roads on our route that have turned out to be gravel tracks through the woods, and there’s no way in hell I would have followed them had we not had confirmation that they were correct.

However, even with the best laid GPS plans, we still go astray. Take yesterday, for example. We were biking from the small spa town of Birstonas to the aforementioned Kaunas, a distance that I thought was supposed to be about 45 km. Not bad. (We’ve discovered that it sounds a lot tougher if you list distances in kilometers instead of miles, so I’m not going to include any conversions.) But problems quickly arose: first, Birstonas is on the bank of a river, which you have to cross if you want to get to Kaunas. We knew that there were ferries at 7:30, 8, 8:30 and 9, and so, when we left the hotel at 9:15, we weren’t particularly worried – surely there would be one at 9:30 as well. But there was not. The ferry – which was actually a blue dinghy that looked like it might have been sunk by the weight of our bikes alone – sat empty, bobbing up and down on the river’s slow-moving current. There wasn’t another one till noon. So we decided to take a bike path – lovely and forested – to a different point of the river and try to cross it via bridge. That was fine until the bike path merged with the main highway, a road frequented by logging trucks. We turned around. Took another bike path and managed to make it to the other side of the river. Wheeled our bikes through a construction site. After a brief stint on a relatively big road, turned off onto a smaller road – per our route’s instructions – which turned out to be incorrect, and allowed the GPS to guide us back to the correct path.

But there is a problem with our GPS: it, too, has difficulty calculating between pavement and sandy gravel, and led us onto another rough gravel track with pockets of sand deep enough to catch a bike tire. After several false starts, we eventually reached the road we were supposed to be on. This was about two and a half hours into our journey.

We’d probably gone a total of ten kilometers, but I, driven by the power of wishful thinking and a sign I’d seen on the main highway an hour and a half earlier that said that Kaunas was 28 kilometers away, decided we must be right on the outskirts of town. Untrue. We soon passed a sign announcing that Kaunas was actually 30 kilometers away (I nearly cried) and then, five minutes later, 33. Another 15 minutes and Kaunas had magically dropped to 10 kilometers away, then 9 – making me thrilled, ecstatic even, until a new intersection announcd its distance at 23. By this point, I decided, Lithuania was just fucking with me.

Oh, really?

So I kept my head down and kept biking, a seemingly endless distance through open fields and pine forests, all while wondering when I’d gotten so soft. Particularly unhelpful was the fact that we kept passing these magnificent storks, strolling through the fields or sitting perched atop their wide, flat nests (Lithuanians think the storks bring good luck, so they help them out by building nest supports on top of old telephone poles).  Why did these storks make me feel bad? Because they fly from Africa to summer in Lithuania. Seeing how difficult it was for me to pedal for four hours to get between two Lithuanian cities, I think it’s safe to say that I’m grateful I’m not a bird.

Note stork nest.

Eventually, finally, we reached Kaunas, a city whose main claims to fame include a Devil Museum (tons of devil figurines),  a zoological exhibit of thousands of stuffed animals, and the fact that, during World War II, the locals aided the Germans in exterminating the city’s 35,000-member-strong Jewish population (according to one Nazi leader, the availability of trained and willing locals made Kaunas “comparatively speaking, a shooter’s paradise”). I’ll admit that I was not enthralled by the city.

A church in Kaunas, transformed by the Soviets into a stained glass museum.

We did, however, stop for a snack at a restaurant that exemplified why – with the notable exception of cold beetroot soup – Lithuanian cuisine is not something I plan on bringing home. It was a place that featured homemade beer, and the menu  had a snack called “fried bread with cheese.” That sounded to us – as it probably does to you – like a food that must be both artery-clogging and amazingly good. Fried bread? With cheese? How can you go wrong?

Here is how: take sticks of stale bread, fry them in oil, and let them cool to room temperature (making sure that the bread loses its crisp). Dip the end of the breadstick in slightly sweet ranch dressing. Using the dressing as adhesive, roll the now sticky breadsticks in flavorless grated cheese, creating a Snowball-esque savory snack food that manages to be fatty, salty, and completely disgusting, all at the same time.

Potato pancakes, on the other hand, are delicious.

No, really. Take a good look.

Beetroot soup. Pink and delicious.

Complaints aside, the route was beautiful.

When we were on the dairy farm in France and went out with the farmer, Laurent, on one of his weekly delivery runs, we had a conversation about what we’d like our secret super power to be. Laurent, being Laurent, smiled and said, “How can I tell you? It’s a secret.” (An hour or so later, he admitted that he would like to be able to take the most arid, inhospitable land and make it fertile — an appropriate goal, given his line of work.) Peter and I failed to reach consensus on what our one superpower would be, but decided that it would be pretty cool if we were able to speak every language in the world fluently.

It would definitely be a nice skill to have in Lithuania. Want to hear the extent of my Lithuanian so far? “Achoo.” No, it’s not a sneeze (nor is it spelled right). It means “Thanks.”

I’m achoo-ing left and right, hoping that by being effusive in my gratitude, I might distract people from the fact that I don’t know how to say “hello.” (Smile and nod, this is my strategy.) I know, I know — I should put some effort into this. But here are my two justifications for why I am not going to (except, perhaps, to memorize the words that mean “pig trotters” and “blood sausage,” so as to avoid them on restaurant menus):

1. We are here for about four days, and then will be in Latvia. Want to know another language I will never be fluent in?

(You’d think that the two languages would be mutually understandable, sort of like Czech and Slovak, but they’re not. And don’t even get me started on Estonian.)

2. According to my Lonely Planet, Lithuanian — another surviving language of the Baltic branch of the Indo-European language family that is very important to linguists — is “said to be as archaic as Sanskrit in its grammatical forms.” Now, granted, I know nothing about the grammatical forms of Sanskrit. But I’ve heard some of it in yoga classes, and it sounds hard. So does Lithuanian pronunciation. Here, for example, is how I am supposed to say “Call a doctor!” in the case of emergency: “Issaukite gydytoja!” (with accents that this keyboard is not capable of typing). I hope we don’t need medical help.

It’s also an interesting area of the world to consider the politics of language. A lot of people speak Russian, for example. But given the Baltics’ er, sensitive history with their eastern neighbor, you need to be careful where you speak it, lest you be greeted with an even frostier reception than if all you know how to say is a word that sounds like a sneeze. (That’s not entirely true — I have been amazed by how friendly people are here, despite the fact that I am helpless in their language.) We are incredibly lucky that most people under 30 seem to have some knowledge of English — and a willingness to try it. But woe upon the Lithuanian who comes to the United States only knowing how to say “Thank you.”

(Important side note: Peter has just found a television show called “Lithuania’s Got Talent.” The first competitor was singing opera while dressed as Dracula, followed by a man doing a sword dance in an attempt to woo a blanket-wrapped Barbie Doll. Thank god Simon Cowell is not here.)

It’s difficult enough to figure out what foods to order — but I’m struggling with a bigger challenge. Here’s what the Lonely Planet has to say about bathrooms:

We hope you’re not busting for a pee, as working out which toilet door to enter may require some thinking time. The letter “M” makrs a men’s toilet in Estonian, “V” in Latvian or Lithuanian. “N” indicates a women’s toilet in Estonian, “S” in Latvian and “M” in Lithuanian. Some toilets sport the triangle system: a skirt-like triangle for women and a broad-shouldered, upside-down triangle for men. To add even more confusion, in Lithuania (as in neighboring Poland), male toilets may be indicated by a triangle and female toilets by a circle.”

I may never pee again.

Upon our arrival in Birstonas, the "Big Balls" boules team was waiting.

Here is my primary impression of Lithuania at the moment: it is hot. I keep thinking of that line from “Good Morning Vietnam,” when Robin Williams does a fake weather report, and asks a guy (also played by Robin Williams) what it’s like out, and the guy goes, “It’s hot! Damn hot. Real hot. Hot enough in my shorts, I can cook things in them. A little crotch pot cookin’.”

Don’t worry — it hasn’t quite gotten to that point. But it is apparently the hottest summer Lithuania has had in recent memory, and we have been biking through it, during the prime daylight hours of 11am – 2pm. (To all my dermatologists, past and present, I am sorry.) I am religious about sunblock, and yet I have a definite farmer’s tan going on on my left leg. But that’s not as bad as Peter — he has several sunburned spots, plus a head cold. Poor guy.

But other than our various afflictions, we’re doing well. We spent yesterday in a town so small that it didn’t appear in either of our guidebooks, and stayed in a guest house — which we found through a special biking pamphlet, given to us by the bike shop owner in Vilnius  — that was just listed as someone’s first name. We were a little worried, but no need: it was amazing. Granted, at first we couldn’t find the right house, having been led astray by a man in a miniscule black bathing suit standing on his deck who gestured us toward his neighbor’s home, where an irascible dachshund loudly protested our arrival. Turns out that his neighbor did indeed have rooms, but she wasn’t the same person we’d spoken to earlier — our guest house was just down the road, on a street with the same name as the one we were on. (I still don’t quite get that logic.)

Anyway, the correct street and house were both located on the shore of a large lake, bordered by a small dock off of which were jumping a swarm of local children. It took approximately five minutes for us to join them, jumping in with our bike clothes still on (it was as close to a wash as they’ve gotten to recently). And immediately, the heat and fatigue of biking/dragging forty pounds of luggage melted away, as we paddled out to the the lake and stared at the pine forests on the opposite shore, the sound of happy children behind us.

When I did my post-college bike trip, I remember being amazed by the range of emotions I could go through in one day — or even five minutes. Exhaustion was a constant,  frustration common, and a feeling of despair certain every time we hit a hard hill — but then thirty seconds later we’d crest the top and start rolling down, and I’d think that biking was just about the best thing in the world. Then another hill and the cursing would begin again. And then, finally, the end of the day, when we got to take a much-deserved shower (or swim) and I would wonder what could possibly be better.

At the moment, I’m somewhere between those two points — very grateful that we’re doing this bike trip and also very grateful not to be biking at the moment. (Though side note to the diabetics out there: four hours of exercise per day gets you a free pass on an ice cream cone.) We’ve decided to take an extra day here to explore the local river, forest and (most excitingly) spa center and water park — which sounds like a great plan to me. Then it’s on to Kaunas, a bus to the Curonian Spit (which sounds amazing) and after that? Who knows. For now, I’m looking forward to some sleep.

First, the good news. After writing that last post — the one where I found out that Air Baltic had lost the bag containing all of my non-diabetic belongings for a second time, I fell into a restless sleep, full of dreams of luggage and frustration. I really thought the bag was gone. But then, surprise of surprises, I awoke in the morning to find an email from the Vilnius airport saying that my baggage had arrived. No mention of what might have happened to it in the 24 hours since last it was seen — but whatever. By lunch time, I had new pants.

I also had my biking clothes, which meant that we were finally free to set off on the next stage of our adventure: biking to Estonia. I should probably point out here that this is not the first long-distance bike ride I’ve done — after college, I biked from Connecticut to San Francisco with a bunch of college friends. But there are several important differences between that trip and this one. First, it was ten years ago. Second, we had a support van — which meant not only that we didn’t have to carry our own luggage, but that on the days when I didn’t want to bike, I could get a ride. Third, we knew where we were going. And fourth, we had a place to sleep at night.

This trip? Well, it’s a little different.

Hello, panniers! You weigh a lot!

We’re hauling our own luggage, to begin with, and aside from a stack of maps and (thankfully) a small GPS device, we have no idea where the hell we’re going. Oh, and also, everyone here speaks Lithuanian.

Nonetheless, we somehow managed to make our way to the lakeside town of Trakai, 25 or so kilometers from Vilnius (or 35 kilometers, if you take our route). There’s water everywhere you look, a beautiful castle, and lots of Lithuanian men in small bathing suits. We celebrated our arrival by going out for kibinas, crescent-shaped dough pockets that are similar in theory to a calzone, but come stuffed with ground meat and cabbage. This, combined with a national love of the potato, is not making Lithuania the most diabetically friendly country to visit.

Three of these were mine.

After dinner, we strolled along the river bank to check out the castle and, perhaps more importantly, to see what was going on with the two stretch-stretch-stretch-stretch white SUVs that had passed us as we ate. Turns out it was a wedding — as evidenced by a group of flouncily dressed young women who responded to Peter’s request that “Everyone, get together!” not by shooing away the creepy foreign guy, but by posing for a photo.

My outfit didn't quite match.

So here we are, at the edge of a Lithuanian lake, with tired thighs, sore butts, and a hell of a long way to go. Stay tuned.

The Trakai castle

"Catherine! Make a shadow puppet!"

Not bad.

Totally unrelated shot of a woman in Vilnius who makes handmade wedding sashes.

Very cool.

Last night, I wrote an ecstatic post about my lost luggage. It had been found in Latvia! It would be delivered this morning! In my head, trumpets were playing happy songs of victory; clean t-shirts were so close I could imagine their unsticky feeling on my skin.

Oh, Catherine. How innocent you were. This morning, I awoke to find that a. I was still in my short-sheeted bed and b. there was no luggage waiting for me. Never fear, I thought to myself. Perhaps it was on the flight that left at 10. I called the Vilnius airport to confirm this. Yes, yes, they told me. 10am it shall be. So Peter and I went on a hot and sweaty walk across Vilnius, looking for bike jerseys for him, a SIM card for my cell phone carefully stashed in my missing luggage, and dropping  by the bike shop for some additional advice on the tri-country bicycle adventure that we are supposed to leave on tomorrow  morning.

Afterwards, we decided to stop by the hostel to drop off our bags and make sure that the luggage had indeed arrived.

But it had not.

And then began what has to be one of the most annoying travel experiences I have had to date: the Vilnius airport does not have the bag, but the Riga airport insists that it was on a flight at 10am. I called one, then the other, then the other again, trying to figure out where, in this direct, 1/2 hour flight, my bag had gone astray. It was clearly not in the Vilnius airport, which is the size of a rural bus station. But what about Riga? When I called, the representative insisted that it had been sent that morning at ten. Untrue, I told her. It was not in Vilnius. Could she possibly contact one of her colleagues to see if it might be still in Riga? You know, seeing as how it had been sitting outside of her door THAT MORNING?

No, she told me. No, she could not look for it, or have anyone else look for it, for at least three hours more (this was six pm; I already knew that the last flight of the day was around ten). Was there any way they could look for it a little earlier? No. No way. Then, in true adherence to the rules of customer service, she hung up on me. I tried her back. Hung up again. Peter and I both spoke to the people at Vilnius again, and they reconfirmed that the bag was not there. Peter called Riga. She hung up on him.

So, with nothing else to do, we got dinner, sitting outside since the smell of my clothing right now is enough to scare people away. Called the Vilnius airport again on our waitress’s cell phone. They told us that they had “sent a telefax” to Riga and that the bag might be on the plane at 10pm. Did they know for sure? No. No they did not.

We call at 10:45. No bag. Call Riga. No bag. Do they have any idea where the bag might be? No, because as far as they are concerned, they put it on a flight at 10am. Any further recommendations of what to do? No.

I am seriously considering traveling to Riga tomorrow and inviting their customer representatives to smell the armpits of my shirt. If that doesn’t motivate them to find my bag, I don’t know what will.

Here is something Peter and I learned last night: it is very difficult to sleep next to the train tracks in a hostel on a busy street. All night we wrestled with the choice of whether it was better to keep the windows closed — leaving the room hot, stuffy, and smelling vaguely like truffle risotto because of a bag I’d stashed with my diabetes supplies — or opening the window, letting in Baltic mosquitoes and, more importantly, the sound of traffic.

We tried both and were successful with neither, so when it came time to head to the bike shop this morning to pick up our transportation for the next month, we weren’t in our finest condition. Nonetheless, we set off through Vilnius’s old town (lovely, I’ll have you know) in search of a bike shop next to St. Ann’s Cathedral, one of the largest and best-known churches in the town.

That sounded easy enough, except for one thing: Vinius is overrun with churches. The woman at the desk in the hostel, who clearly knew of St. Ann’s, couldn’t find it on a map — the entire thing was dotted with crosses (it was like trying to find something in New York based on how close it was to a hot dog stand). But eventually we succeeded, and discovered that what had been advertised as a bike shop next to an artist’s shop was actually a guy with a couple of bikes sitting *in* an artist’s shop — and by artist’s shop I don’t mean some place selling hand-crafted souvenirs. I’m talking like, paper and pastels.

The bike "shop"

Nonetheless, the owner greeted us politely — surprisingly so, given how many questions I’ve been emailing him over the past several weeks, and cheerfully began to detail — in detail that was both too detailed and yet not detailed enough — several of the seemingly infinite ways that we could get from Vilnius (Lithuania) to Talinn (Estonia) on our bicycles. As our pile of maps began to grow and his directions became more elaborate (describing particular left-hand turns we were to make two weeks into the journey) a woman popped her head in to see if he were going to take her on the bike tour he had promised nearly an hour beforehand, when we had arrived.

“Let’s go!” he said. “Do you want to come on a city tour?”

In reality, Peter and I just wanted to take the maps and go to sleep — we were working on about 10 hours over the preceding two days. But since we still had questions, we had to join them. And so we set off on a four-hour tour of the city.

Some quick thoughts: Vilnius is really pretty. There are areas where you can see traditional wooden homes on dirt roads with modern office buildings two blocks away in the background. Also, Lithuanian food is going to be diabetically challenging. They are very into dumplings here — at lunch, Peter and I made the mistake of ordering a traditional food whose name translates to “Zeppelin” — as in, the blimp — two enormous, butter-soaked potato dumplings with unidentified ground meat inside. Definitely going to stick to the beet soup.

I'm happier than I look.

After a brief jaunt up to the top of a parking garage (which happened to offer a lovely view) and a pass by the Genocide Museum (we may still visit it — but it sounds horrible), I took a shower with my pants on and got on with the process of trying to find my missing bag.

Oh, the missing bag. As mentioned in the post below, I still had my diabetes supplies, but that’s about it — one pair of pants (sweat-soaked, hence the shower), one shirt, and one pair of underwear. Not exactly the supplies one wants to have to bike across the Baltics. The office in Vilnius said they had no idea where it was — they had sent emails to Milan and Riga and had not heard back, and claimed to not be able to make a phone call because it was outside of the “system.” As anyone who knows me is aware, I do not like “systems.” And so, after thanking them profusely for trying to help, I decided it was time to go Catherine.

This can be a frightening thing to see. Thanks to years of practice with my health insurance company, I have developed what Peter might call a terrifying ability to deal with phone trees. You can try to dissuade me with automated answering services, confusing keypad prompts, hell, even busy signals in Latvian.  I am like a dog with a bone — and the more you try to shake me, the more I will not let go. I will be polite. Oh yes, I will be polite. But I will also get my way.

There was a time tonight, however, when I was not so sure. I had managed, after several tries, to successfully place a call to what I thought was the Riga  baggage office, who told me that their system was down and that they couldn’t check on my bag for at least another two hours. I then spent the next hour battling with what has to be one of the most formidable nemeses of them all: Malpensa International Airport in Milan. I had to call three different people to get the number for the airport itself, got diverted to a phone tree that wanted a code that I did not have in order to track my bag through an automated system (I do not do automated), got back on the line with an operator, convinced her to tell me the shortcut so that I could speak to a person, called that line, got punted to a holding pattern that played the first four measures of Vivaldi’s “The Four Seasons” over and over again before apologizing that it was going to have to hang up on me, called back enough times to get someone to pick up, learned that it was not the Air Baltic number, was given another Air Baltic number, called it three times, got someone to pick up, learned from her that it was the wrong number, got a different number that was clearly not in Italy, asked her what country it was, who she was, what department I had called, succeeded in getting her to hang up on me,  called her back twice more and let it ring just to annoy her, called the main number again, no luck, waited for another hour, called Riga back, discovered that they had given me the wrong number as well, got the right number, called it, reached a woman who asked me why I had not tried Vilnius, agreed finally to go look to see if she could find my bag herself, was put on hold and . . .

SHE FOUND IT!!

My bag is in Riga. I don’t think I’ve ever considered that the sentence, “My bag is in Latvia right now” could have a positive meaning, but it does. Providing that it does not get lost again (and that they are able to find this hostel), by this time tomorrow night I will be wearing a new pair of socks.

So relieved.

These are just some of the numbers I tried.