Europe Wool Fesitval Vacation

Well, we're home and skipping email wasn't really the best part of the trip. I'm feeling pretty good, having slept all night last night. Dom was up most of the night, and fell asleep this afternoon and is still sleeping, so we'll see how long it takes him to get over his jetlag. That's it for now. I'm still writing about the trip in my journal and my add some posts to this blog as an afterthought, but no promises. I hope you all enjoyed traveling with us via this blog.

Donna

I think the best thing about this trip was that I only checked email once a day, or once every few days. And the times between wifi hot spots with no access to email were quite liberating (although I do like to be able to research things online at will). I'm tired of being tied to my computer all the time. When I get home, I think I'm only going to check my email once every afternoon. How's that for sticking it to the man? I already don't carry a mobile phone, so I'm a communications rebel anyway. Email was more fun when it was an oddity like ham radios. Now it's just a boring and often annoying form of communications, where you feel like you owe it to everybody to be "on" all the time. Blech. I think I'm going to go back to writing letters by hand on paper.

Well, that has nothing to do with Europe, per se, but there you have it. Will be offline for 24+ hours soon, en route from Lithuania to Longmont via trains, planes, and automobiles... TTYL!

It rained every day while we were in England, but in spotty showers that came and went between dry spells and even some sunshine. It was like that here in Vilnius yesterday, and we took a quick walk around the Old Town area before going to bed to sleep for 12 hours. But it rained solidly all night and it appears that it will do the same all day today, so I'm afraid we won't make it to Kernave. I know we've come all the way from the US and I've had this high on my list of things to do for a long time, but I'm just not up to standing around in the rain all day, and perhaps sloshing through mud, and I don't know if they cancel events here for bad weather either. It's a shame, because I finally found a website with up to date information about the event, and it sounds great.

Go to this page, and click on this: FESTIVAL OF EXPERIMENTAL ARCHAEOLOGY "DAYS OF LIVE ARCHAEOLOGY IN KERNAVĖ" IX Festival - 6-8 July, 2007 (more information)

Here are a couple of pictures from their site:





The festival goes on through Sunday, so if the weather lightens up, we might go tomorrow.

Today I'm going to try to go to these museums instead:

The National Museum of Lithuania, which has a large exhibit of the Lithuanian National Costume (incidentally, we saw a lot of people in traditional costumes yesterday walking around the square and on Pilies gatvė, the main street in Old Town, dressed up for the holiday events that were taking place.



The Aukso Avis textile gallery, featuring the work of contemporary fiber artists. (Felting is really hot here, I even found some bags of fiber for needle felting in one of the yarn shops I popped into yesterday.)

The Amber Museum & Gallery is not officially a museum, but apparently they love to talk about Amber there, and some of the staff speaks English.

Ok, everyone, we've arrived in Vilnius. We walked around a pedestrian mall in Kaunas this morning, got some litas out of the ATM, and then realized most of the stores were closed, even though it was well after 10:00, the posted opening time. So we hopped onto the next bus (I was able to purchase our tickets without speaking any English, although I did have to note that I only speak a little Lithuanian, because everyone here talks so fast, all of the words run together into one long slur--kindof like New Yorkers). The clerks at the hotels speak English much better than I speak Lithuanian, so I find that I limit myself to a polite laba diena (good day) and ačiu (thank you, said "achyoo"), rather than trying to fumble along.

Today is a holiday here, Mindaugas Coronation Day (dedicated to King Mindaugas, the founder of the state, Grand Lithuanian Dukedom, who was crowned on this date in 1253), and there should be lots of interesting things going on in the city square. Unfortunately, it's raining cats and dogs, so we probably will not try to walk that far. However, there's a big festival going on at the city that was King Mindaugas's capital, and we are going to go to that tomorrow. It's called, "Days of Living History and Archaeology" and it is , according to one tourist website, "an outdoor festival in Kernave, Lithuania's ancient capital, during which Lithuanians recreate life as it was, live in ancient villages and practice prehistoric crafts including food preparation and cooking, fur and amber processing, medieval iron smelting, coin minting and weapons production. Special outdoor areas are also prepared to show how medieval battles and military skills were performed."

I hope they have some spinning and knitting, too!

That's it for now. We need to find some food and drink and the rain has let up a bit, so now is a good time to look for a kavine (cafe) or draugas (drug store for bottled water).

We just arrived in Kaunas, Lithuania about an hour ago. We're staying in a nice hotel here tonight, and tomorrow we're taking a bus to Vilnius and we'll be staying there for a few days. The biggest Lithuanian airport is in Kaunas, but we would have had to pay a LOT more to fly there, because our US travel agent could only find flights that were $700 each, and I found flights for about $32+tax from Ryan Air, by booking online. The only catch was that they only fly into Kaunas, which is fine because this way we'll get to see both cities and what's in between. Good night!