In case it's helpful to others planning a trip to the Baltics, I'm going to share my notes on highlights of our trip to Vilnius, Riga, Tallinn, and Helsinki in May 2025. I'm going to have to break this up into parts to meet the Travel Forum character limit. We loved the Baltics and believe it's truly a hidden gem of Europe! Here goes ...
FUNNY STORY OF HOW WE KIND OF WASTED A DAY (or did we …): So, we are suckers for open-air museums and we decided to prioritize getting to The Ethnographic Open-Air Museum of Latvia. What a strange but memorable experience we had that afternoon. The highlight was hiring a taxi to take us to the location because it is quite a ways out of town and not super easy to get to via public transportation (and we were just not feeling up to that challenge for whatever reason). Our taxi driver threw us for a loop when he started talking about the good ol’ days of communism and how it was so much better then. Not expecting to hear that. We were curious. So, we asked for examples of what’s worse now. He talked about too many cars on the road and how back when they were communist, there might only be one car for an entire apartment building so not as much traffic. Driving was so much easier then! Just fascinating. He was nice and we were curious and it was a cordial conversation. When we got to the open-air museum it was lunch time, so we grabbed a bite at the nice museum restaurant where we had a very good meal. Our waitress was also the cook and the person who cleaned up, as well. She did it all with a very pleasant can-do attitude. Fortunately, we were the only ones there, so it was manageable for her. We felt like we should pitch in to help! The museum itself has the start of something really good, but it’s very spread out with minimal explanations and it’s like a ghost town. It was just us and a handful of other people wandering around a forest peering at an occasional rustic wooden structure. Including a Japanese man walking around in a business suit, which just seemed bizarre. It was all like something out of a movie.
NOTE: Maybe we missed factors that would have improved our experience with the exhibits. It could have been human error on our parts, for sure. Just relaying how it played out for us at that time so others who may be considering a visit to the Ethnographic Open-Air Museum of Latvia (outside Riga) hear an honest account from a traveler, FWIW.