Looking back to our first post, we had cities in five countries in front of us – Portugal, Spain, Lithuania, Norway, and Scotland. Technically, our feet are landing in seven countries, it is just that two of them are mere hours or days. I’ll drop the spoiler here, the sixth is Latvia and the seventh is England. I’m separating England and Scotland of course because they are two countries under the umbrella of the United Kingdom. More of a spoiler – because of the fiasco of our initial Edinburgh rental, instead of just spending a couple of days in London, England, before we leave, we are spending the week before that in York.
Hopefully, I’ll have time to write about that before we are actually on U.S. soil again. Keeping up with newsy blog posts while being a tourist and working remotely has proved a challenge. Throwing linear storytelling out the window, I am going to work on some posts about places I’ve neglected up til now. They are just too interesting not to share.
To get from Valencia, Spain, to Klaipeda, Lithuania, we had to make a connection in Riga, Latvia. The way the flights worked, we had about five hours from the time we landed until we needed to be back at the airport to head to Lithuania. Far too long to linger at a smallish airport. We also already had to check our suitcases due to the size limits, which are quite tight, on Air Baltic. So with only our backpacks on us, it was easy to get an Uber from the airport to Old Town Riga.
We really saw this as a bonus on the trip. Neither one of us had been to Riga and it is a very old city. Even if all we could do was walk around the old town for a bit and get some lunch, that would be enough of a treat. The Uber we caught was with a really nice guy. When we explained what we were doing, he made some recommendations to get us away from the touristy parts (nice) and then offered to pick us up and give us a lift back to the airport at a prearranged time (very nice).
We wandered and found some great character here. Art Nouveau buildings, of course old churches, a section of the old wall, the three brothers (historic buildings), and cobble streets. We had a fabulous lunch, wandered, stopped at very cool, quaint coffee shop for cake(!) and coffee, and wandered some more. There were plans to go down to the water but 1) we kept getting turned around on those twisty streets and 2) it really began to pour. Given we had a prearranged pick up time, what were we to do?
Staying dry and day drinking.
The answer, of course, was that we found a gastropub with a covered porch and ordered a couple of beers. The waiter asked if it was our first time in Riga and then said he had something for us. He brought us some samples of Black Currant flavored Riga Black Balsam. It is a traditional Latvian herbal bitters that has been around for 260 years and it was wonderful. We purchased a bottle at duty free to take to Lithuania, hoping that friendly rivalry between the two countries wouldn’t matter when it came to a sipping liquor. It didn’t, by the way.
