Kaunas — the second rival, and a closing bracket for the Baltics

Two urban rivals — and the closing bracket of our Baltic loop.

In the morning we moved on to Kaunas, Lithuania’s second-largest city. Its twin city is Brno (Vilnius is twinned with Prague.) On the way we drove through some proper downpours, and brought one of them straight into town with us.

We parked in the centre and set off to explore. We walked the town-hall square and over to Kaunas Castle. Inside, a modest exhibition with an underground section. The city is old, but wars have battered it thoroughly — there’s not much original fabric left.

It was raining when we came out of the museum, so we grabbed lunch (radar promised dry skies within the hour). After food we carried on to the confluence of the Neris and the Nemunas. Not a remarkable spot in itself, but a pleasant bit of nature-walking.

Kaunas is a European Capital of Culture this year (as Tartu will be in 2024). One of the programme strands is an exhibition connecting Vilnius and Kaunas. We’d stumbled onto it by accident in Vilnius; here we sought it out deliberately.

And while the exhibition links the two cities, it accidentally also bookended our whole trip. Vilnius was where it began; Kaunas is where it ends.

Tomorrow we move on to Poland — a full day of driving. Sunday brings the Energylandia amusement park, and then home.

We fit a lot in. It was demanding: planning, reservations, hunting down destinations, nightly data backups, charging every device in sight. At the same time, the tools worked as loyal companions: Google got us everywhere without issue; Booking was flawless and made it easy to message the hosts (I got a note today informing me we’d hit Genius 3 status).

I’d hoped the kids would be a bit more swept up in all of it; not quite. Maybe they’ll take something away from it later — through the photos, through the videos.

So here’s to the real holiday starting now.