The PicuMarZ Diary

Yesterday we spent all day packing and cleaning up after us in my dad's house. We felt sad to leave, but at least we had something nice to look forward to as well: 10 days in the capital of Lithuania, Vilnius. Stephen and I have visited Estonia and Latvia previous summers, and now we wanted to experience the third Baltic country, too.

My dad drove us to the train station in Bennas at 1am, and we spent the rest of the night in a sleep cabin at the train. We arrived to Tikkurila station (near Helsinki) at 6:30am, and from there we took the bus to the airport.

We arrived in good time, the flight went fine and we arrived to Vilnius at 10:40am. Adventurous as we are , we decided to take the bus instead of a taxi. The bus was very cheap, but after a while we started worrying how on earth we would know when to get off the bus! I decided to ask the woman standing next to me, who Miranda already had made friends with . She did not know where our hotel is, but she called a friend to ask. Very helpful people!

When we arrived to the centre of Vilnius the bus got totally crammed with people, but a few stops later almost everyone got off again.

Eventually it was time for us to get off the bus, and the last obstacle before reaching our hotel were a lot of stairs, on which we had to carry all our luggage and Miranda in the push chair.

So when we arrived to the hotel we were quite exhausted, but we forgot all about it as soon as we saw our hotel room, or more correctly: our hotel suite!!! For the price of Eur80 per night we had expected a normal hotel room, not a two bedroom suite with two bathrooms and a huge balcony! In addition, our room was almost on the top floor, on 19th floor with an incredible view of Neris river and Vilnius centre. We were just waiting for a phone call from reception telling us that they had given us the wrong room by mistake .

We rested for a while, enjoyed the view from our hotel room and took a bath before going out to start exploring Vilnius. We crossed River Neris on the pedestrian bridge called White Bridge. Then we walked towards the centre and arrived to Gediminas Avenue. There we found a pizzeria called "Chili Pica", where we ate a tasty pizza to a very good price.

Strengthened by the food we continued walking until we arrived to Old Town. We saw many interesting sights during our walk, for example St Catherine's Church, St Casimir's Church, the Town Hall, the Cathedral and the Bell Tower.

In the evening we walked back to our hotel along Neris river.