Another fine hot day greeted us as we met for our driving tour of the city. Our Latvian guide for the morning was excellent. He had studied archeology and theology and was passionate about his country's history. As we passed the various embassies he hummed an appropriate song and later during the tour he sang local folk songs - boy could he sing. After driving for half an hour we got out for our walking tour of the old town seeing a mixture of Gothic, Renaissanc...

We are in store for another warm day as we leave Vilnius for Latvia and Riga. We expect to get there by 230pm so it won't be too long in the bus. As we leave Vilnius we finally see some traffic and people. This was a long weekend in Lithuania and everyone seemed to be out of the city. It made it easy to look around but it was eerie. During the journey our tour guide went through some housekeeping issues and then put on some music from her home country Sweden &...

The bad news for today was that the people who ran the Museum of Genocide Victims (aka KGB Museum) decided that today, being fathers day, they would not be opening the museum even though it was scheduled to open. Our local guide had been notified the day before and after calling the director could not get them to change their mind. It reminder her of the days under Russian rule and autocratic decision making. The good news was that the weather was again fantast...

Today is just a long bus trip (0830-1730) from Warsaw to Vilnius Lithuania where we will reside for 2 nights. The trip was pleasant starting out on a highway with 2 lanes each way reducing to 1 lane each way. There was hardly any traffic on the road but many of those who were caused our driver some grief as they were not that good at signalling their intentions. He had obviously seen it all before as he handled it well. The drive took us over very flat land wh...

More warmer than average days for this time of the year in Warsaw – again in the high 20s. Yesterday (Thursday) we wandered the area around our hotel and spent time in the National Museum. The museum was not exactly what we expected; we would call it an art gallery. Having said that, it was good and did help us understand more of the Polish history. We also caught up on some housekeeping things before meeting up with other members of the tour group at ...