The other thing I hadn’t realized was how dang cold it would
be there at the time. This dawned on me months before I left, but certainly had
no impact on booking the tour. The silly thing was, the “Stans” are also on my
list but I was pretty sure they’d be too cold. So although I considered weather
when booking, I didn’t consider it enough.
Still, I did fine in packing. Three pairs of pants (one
lined Redhead pair of jeans, the other two LL Bean), one pair of long johns courtesy
of Eddie Bauer, three LS button-down shirts and three LS T-shirt-ish shirts,
plus the wonderful LL Bean coat I got for living in North Dakota. Normally, I
don’t pack more than a pair of shoes but threw in boots at the last minute
(also LL). Debated the snow boots but am glad I didn’t opt for that. Was fine
with the clothes, plus the hat, gloves, scarf and whatever those things are
that are wide tubes of fabric you can use as hats, scarves or what-have-you. I
got on in Helsinki and it was perfect.
We met in Vilnius, which I still cannot say, in Lithuania,
which I still have trouble spelling. I’d researched airport transport before,
which was pretty much the extent of my research for the trip, and paid a whole
euro to get from the airport almost directly in front of the Radisson Blu we
were meeting at.
The tour, run by Baltic Visions, was perfect for what I was
looking for. I missed the get-together the evening before because my flight was
a little later than everyone else’s; they all had long journeys. We only had
nine people because it was basically offseason, so that was cool. There were
three singles, me, a guy from Brisbane, Australia; a stereotypical New Yorker I
had my fill of by Thursday; a young Australian couple from Canberra; an older
Irish couple from Dublin and a mother-and-daughter from Germany. The daughter was
older than me, and the mom didn’t speak English, but everyone else did. I can’t
imagine flying from Australia for just one week anywhere; the couple had gone
something like Canberra-Perth-Doha-somewhere else – Vilnius. The single guy,
who was a physical therapist, was traveling in the region for the following
week, so that wasn’t so bad. But boy, that is a long, long way to go for a
week.
The routing was Vilnius-Riga-Tallinn with a couple of
sightseeing stops on the travel days. It was nice to be in Christian countries
around Easter, and I was able to go into churches celebrating Easter. I couldn’t
understand a word, but I spent the night before Easter in some cathedrals
listening to music, seeing weird rituals (a priest going through the standing
crowd – no chairs – chanting and waving smoke at people) – and just being at
peace.
My favorite stop, which I had no idea about before I booked
the trip, is this site in northern (I think) Lithuania called the Hill of
Crosses.
Here’s a link to the history of it: https://sacredsites.com/europe/lithuania/hill_of_crosses.html
“The tradition of
placing crosses dates from [the 1200s] and probably first arose as a symbol of
Lithuanian defiance of foreign invaders. Since the medieval period, the Hill of
Crosses has represented the peaceful resistance of Lithuanian Catholicism to
oppression. “
In case the name wasn’t clear enough, it’s literally a hill
that is filled with crosses people have put up. And by “crosses,” I mean
thousands upon thousands. One university class attempted to count them but stopped
when they hit 100k. In a small area, there might be one big cross that has smaller
crosses and rosaries hanging off the T part and then scores of smaller ones
planted at the base. It’s a combination of spiritual, peaceful, eerie with a
good dose of “wait, isn’t this just litter?” thrown in.
It’s a little walk off the highway, and you go under an
overpass to get there. On the parking side of the overpass, there are several
booths where you can pay 1E for a little cross, maybe six inches high, with a
spear to spike it in the dirt. As you walk through the site, you can see them
starting to decompose when you look closely at the bottom layer.
Stuff made of wood was big in the Baltics; driving through,
it’s forest upon forest. Stupidly, I did NOT buy a cross at the Hill of
Crosses. They had the little cheap ones to plant, sure, but I didn’t want that.
I collect nice ones but I have to also like them. It’s not like “Oh, I’m here;
I need a cross so let me just grab … this one.” I have to like it, and the only
one I saw there was pretty dang expensive, so I didn’t buy it, reasoning that
since there was wood stuff everywhere, I’d eventually find one. No. Oh well.
Still, it was my favorite part of the tour, even though it
was basically just a 30-minute stop. A very good place to just stop and
reflect.
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