Country: Latvia, Lithuania
Distance travelled: 225km
Weather: Sunny and warm

I discussed our plans for the day with Mark as we lounged in bed, gathering the enthusiasm to get up. I wanted to have a look around town while Mark had had enough trudging and wanted to spend the day processing photos and taking it easy. We decided that after breakfast I would ride into town, not very far from where we were, while Mark would stay put and do whatever he liked.

We ate breakfast together and then I slipped a camera into his backpack and rode off. I knew there was at least two interesting churches as well as a reputedly good market to visit. Back in Riga we had obtained a tourist brochure for Liepāja which had a recommended route to view their Art Nouveau architecture, not a style I had expected to see in wooden structures as well as several other points of interest. The first church I came to, Liepāja Holy Trinity Cathedral, was all white with mostly gold trimmings internally but they had a no photograph policy so I gawped about like a tourist for a bit and then headed off. I sketchily followed the recommended route, getting sidetracked by church steeples a few times and past the house famed for having hosted Peter the First of Russia on his trip to Western Europe, one of the oldest buildings in Liepāja.

As I rounded a corner, I discovered both the town market and another church, St Anna Evangelical Lutheran Church. I locked the bike up and wandered back to the church but a sign in the vestibule indicated that I would need to be wearing long sleeves and trousers to enter. I had the trousers but had opted for a t-shirt today so that was a no go. Back in the market I found a lady selling čebureki and with the help of an interpreter from two stalls up bought two filled with cheese and pork. I also bought a small bag of peas which we will have to shell before we can eat them, shouldn’t be too hard to work out.

On the far side of the markets I found another church, St Joseph’s Roman Catholic Cathedral, no dress codes, no entry donation and when I asked, no problem with my taking photos. I thought it much nicer by far than the first with a rich wood interior and I spent some time looking about and climbing the tower. After a while I realised it was past lunchtime and I had better take my čebureki back to Mark for us to eat. As I pulled up beside the van, it occurred to me that I hadn’t managed to locate a post box to mail some postcards so I dumped the bag and camera with Mark and set off again.

Eventually locating the city centre, which I had somehow managed to circumnavigate previously, I used my iPhone to connect to a free wifi network to look online for a post office since this town seemed devoid of post boxes that I could identify. A post office was found, I had ridden past it at least twice, and when I finally located it again, it was to find that the post box itself was a small wooden box inside the building that someone actually had to point out to me while I nervously clutched my postcards. It was on the ride back to Mark again that I found the best of the wooden Art Nouveau buildings, unfortunate since I had no camera this time.

We fried up our čebureki and ate them with some sour cream we had in the fridge and then drove to Karosta, a once closed soviet town theoretically now deserted. Karosta, just north, feels more like a suburb of Liepāja than a separate town. As we toured around we saw plenty of people living in the dilapidated apartment buildings and although many cars were worse for wear there was an equal number of spiffy upmarket vehicles. I felt a little like we were driving through a zoo peering into people’s private lives. We quickly made our way to the St. Nicholas’s Orthodox Naval Cathedral and took a few photos. It would have to be the best example of this style of religious building we have come across and I preferred it even to the Church of the Savior on Spilled Blood we had seen in St Petersburg.

After that it was off to Lithuania. We crossed the border at the usual EU sign but the roads, resoundingly poor in Latvia, did not immediately improve as I had hoped. To be fair we were not on a major route but we did find when we pulled up to withdraw some money from an autoteller, that the kitchen tap had somehow shaken itself on and water had spilled all over the bench and onto the floor.

An hour or so of driving had us at tonight’s target, the world famous Hill of Crosses. The fee to park a motorhome there is 10 litas but we arrived too late to buy our parking ticket so will have to take care of it in the morning. There was another motorhome there, from Germany, in the same predicament so I didn’t feel too guilty. We walked over to the Hill in the daylight to scope it out and see if there was any good photo opportunities then went back to the van for dinner.

Once dinner was over and dusk was falling, I left Mark to relax and went back with a camera and the 50mm lens. It was a mistake to limit myself with just one lens as some shots could have done with a wider field of view than the 50mm lens provided me but I was quite satisfied with the majority taken. I found the place strangely eerie, not helped by a recording being played in a language I couldn’t understand (I assume it was Pope John Paul II giving mass in 1993). It was also irritatingly untidy. Probably my OCD coming out…

  

As the sun dropped below the horizon the bugs appeared although no mosquitoes that I noticed and I hurried back to Mark and the van, indulging in a nightcap of a banana flavoured custard we had been carting around since England before finally retiring for the night.