This is the third installment a narrative of a vacation trip that my wife Frances and I took to the Baltic States (Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania) during August 14-28, 2017. This was an independent trip, not a package tour. We are in our early 60s, reasonably healthy, and used to walking. We are Americans, living in Alexandria Virginia. Neither of us speaks any of the languages of the three countries.
This thread covers a single, long, day, as we traveled from Riga to Vilnius.
Wednesday, August 23 (Riga to Vilnius)
Before continuing with the chronology, I have to step back and explain what we had planned before we started the trip. I am half-Lithuanian. My grandfather on my mother’s side was born in Žagarė, a village just south of the border with Latvia. My maternal grandmother was born in the USA, but her parents came from Kaunas, Lithuania’s second city and one-time capital. My ancestry was a main reason for taking this trip. Although we don’t have any information about living relatives in Lithuania or exactly where my ancestors lived, I still wanted to stand in the towns and have a look at them. Thus it was that we arranged for a private guide, Edgars Lazdiņš of Riga Taxi Tours, to drive us from Riga to Vilnius, with stops in Žagarė and Kaunas along the way.
Our original proposal was that we would stop at Rundale Palace in Latvia, proceed to the Tervete hillfort, make a stop in Žagarė, go from there to Kaunas, and at our hotel in Vilnius. Edgar pointed out that Rundale was out of the way, and it would be very late at night by the time he finished driving back to Riga from Vilnius. We agreed to cut out Rundale. (This didn’t bother us. Our trip plans usually follow the pattern of wanting to do too much and then cutting them down to size.) This exchange was carried out by email before we left home. Thus, we had a definite plan that morning in Riga: Tervete, Žagarė, Kaunas, Vilnius.
We had our breakfast, checked out of the hotel, and assembled with our luggage in the lobby. At the appointed time, I went outside to scout around and noticed a man standing on the other side of the street next to a silver-gray Volkswagen Golf. I went over and asked if he was Edgar. He was. We loaded our bags into the hatchback and set off.
As we drove out of Riga into the countryside we chatted a bit about who we were, what we were doing, and what we were seeing along the way. It was a grey cloudy day with the threat of rain in the air. I got my higher education in Iowa, and the countryside looked a lot like that: mostly flat, with fields broken by stands of trees. There were farmhouses here and there, and we would go through small towns along the highway. The architecture of the buildings, the crops, and the kinds of trees were all different, but the pattern of land use was familiar. Edgar told us about how the farms had been collectivized during Soviet times and were now being broken up into private hands again. Sometimes in the distance we would see manor houses from an even earlier time when the land had been divided into large estates.
Things began to take a strange twist when Edgar asked why we were interested in Tērvete. I said something about our interest in history and wanting see some of the country outside Riga. He remarked that Tērvete was based on a children’s story and was mostly visited by families. Our sides of the conversation didn’t seem to fit together. In short order it became clear that he was taking us to a nature park and not to a hillfort. At that point, I wasn’t sure if I had misunderstood something I had read before the trip, and so I didn’t push back about what we had planned. The hillfort was not a “must see,” more of a “by the way.” The nature park sounded like an interesting place to visit as well.