A few years back we took our first trip to Eastern Europe, and it was one of my favorite trips. We started in Croatia, traveled on to Slovenia, Hungary, Austria, and ended the journey in the Czech Republic after two weeks of fairly ambitious travel. I remember when planning out that trip that I would have loved to stretch out the end point and finish in Warsaw, Poland, because I have always wanted to visit there. Unfortunately there just wasn’t enough time.
That near miss, with Kuniko’s interest in visiting the Baltic States, and the availability of a direct flight to Helsinki, Finland, combined to end up being the trip we took this summer. It started in Helsinki, and then we traveled by ferry across the gulf of Finland to Tallinn in Estonia, from there by bus to Riga, Latvia, by plane to Vilnius, Lithuania, by plane again to Minsk, Belarus, and then another hop in a plane to Warsaw, Poland. Minsk ended up in there because of a unique visa situation, so we found ourselves visiting six countries in two weeks. But unlike previous trips, the amount of sightseeing was less – these are for the most part small cities in small countries, not really on the main tourist track. This could be a good thing or bad thing depending what your expectations are for the trip, but we were looking to relax more this time and I think we met that goal nicely.
It was a great trip, and I’ll describe what we did in the following blog posts as a kind of memory aid for me – I often like to look back at the trips and using a combination of photos and this journal, things come back remarkably clearly. Enjoy the journal!
Pictures from our trip:
