Getting to Lithuania was completely painless. We left home shortly after noon on Sunday and drove 500 odd kilometres to a surprisingly pleasant hotel, conveniently located just off the A21 in
Germany. This enabled us to literally drive off the motorway into the hotel’s car park and drive back onto it the next morning.
This was almost identical to the route we took last year, when we caught the ferry from Puttgarden to Rødby in Denmark. This time, though, we were to catch the ferry from Kiel, some
distance west of Puttgarden. Thanks to our children waking up at the crack of dawn, we arrived at the harbour in Kiel early on Monday morning and were able to check in at a leisurely pace.
At around 12:30, we drove aboard the DFDS Lisco Gloria, where we abandoned the car and headed for our cabin, which turned out to be a little more spacious than we had been expecting.
The crossing was very smooth and Denmark was visible on the port side for several hours after departure. There wasn’t much to do, so we hung out in the bar for most of the afternoon. I read our guidebook and the children largely amused themselves.
All around us, TV sets spewed third-rate American tat, rendered even more insipid by the Lithuanian dubbing, which employs the same deadpan voice for all of the actors; yes, even those of the opposite sex. This doesn’t seem to perturb the Lithuanians, though, who are presumably bludgeoned into acceptance at an early age.
Dinner and breakfast on the boat were notable, but only because they were particularly bad. The available items were deceptive in their apparent edibility, but soon betrayed their composition of a strange concoction of wax and grease.
I paid the bar another visit in the evening, by which time it was full of Lithuanian lorry drivers, knocking back cheap vodka.
We docked at noon the next day after a pleasant passage along Kuršių Nerija, better known in English as the Curonian Spit. We were one of the first cars off the boat and headed straight to Klaipėda for lunch, stopping en route for some satisfyingly sub-euro petrol.
As anticipated, the sat-nav had only cursory coverage of Klaipėda, but it was
enough to point us towards the town centre, where we parked and found a place
to have lunch.
Klaipėda is very downbeat and unassuming, a relaxed way to make Lithuania’s acquaintance and a good place to kill a few hours.
After some spent walking around in the glorious sunshine, we returned to the car and headed to the ferry that would take us across the water to the Curonian Spit.
A few minutes later, we were on the Spit and driving south through the national park to the small settlement of Nida, where we were booked in for a couple of nights.
Nida is about 4 km from the border with the Russian Kaliningrad oblast, an exclave marooned by the disintegration of the former USSR.
For the hell of it, we drove all the way down to the border before turning back. Even if we’d wanted to go further, we have neither visas nor car insurance for Russia, so we’d never get in. We could have arranged both in advance of our departure, of course, but this whole trip was rather last-minute and there wasn’t really enough time to surrender our passports and have them got hrough the Russian bureaucratic mangle.
Today, we had planned to go biking along the Spit, but thunderstorms and pouring rain that lasted well into the afternoon put paid to that idea. Instead, we spent the morning couped up in our room.
After a good lunch, we drove up to the fragile sand dunes for which the Curonian Spit is famous. They’re really quite beautiful and vaguely reminiscent of desert sands. These are the highest drifting sand dunes in Europe and well worth a visit. From the 52 m summit of the Parnidis dune, one can see rippling dunes stretching into Russia and to the horizon.
We spent a good length of time walking around the sand dunes before we headed back into town, soon after which it started to rain again. We consider ourselves lucky to have salvaged anything from the day.
Dinner this evening, at Sena Sodyba, was delicious. The food here has been very good so far, better than I’d dared hope from my reading and experiences on the ferry.
Yesterday, I had my first taste of cepelinai, which are a kind of potato dumpling. They’re very stodgy, but taste a lot better than they look.
Foreign tourists are clearly quite the minority here. Most of the tourists in this summer hotspot are the Lithuanians themselves, with quite a few Germans and the occasional Russian. I’ve seen a couple of Dutch cars driving around, too, but not many.
Not much English is spoken here, so we occasionally have to break into broken German to get the message across. Lithuanian’s a bit of a tongue-twister, but it’s fun to try, even if my attempts are invariably met with hilarity.
We haven’t quite figured out whether we’re going to try to stay here another night or drive north to Latvia tomorrow. We’d like to do tomorrow what we intended to do today, but there’s no guarantee the weather will be any better tomorrow.