At home and abroad

Summer finally arrived in San Diego this weekend with sweaty, thuggish force, but Steve and I will soon be heading north. We won’t quite get within spitting distance of the North Pole, but we’ll be closer to it than we ever have before. We will travel via the Midwest, where we’ll first attend a family wedding September 9. We have to be back to the West Coast less than three weeks later, to prepare for and drive to Reno for another important wedding.

Could we go somewhere interesting in between? Our thoughts turned to the Baltic Sea, an area Steve and I flew over years ago on the way to St. Petersburg. Three plucky little countries line its eastern shore: Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia, all occupied by Stalin and his forces after the Second World War. By all accounts, they were grim sad places until the early 1990s, when the Soviet Union broke up, they gained their independence, and began to flourish. Steve and I have long been curious about them.

Now we’ll find out what’s there. From Chicago, we’ll fly next Sunday (9/11) to Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania. We’ll spend three nights there then make our way north, first to Riga (in Latvia), then on to Tallinn, the capital of Estonia. Finally, we’ll take a ferry across the Gulf of Finland to stay in Helsinki four nights before starting the journey home.

As usual, I plan to report on things I find interesting. I assume we’ll find some. That’s why we go.