Vilnius

18 April 2025 – 22 April 2025

My first outing of the year proved rather less productive than hoped. A long-weekend in Scotland led to a pleasant trip to Arrochar, but not not the winter conditions I had hoped for. I got some much needed rope handling practice in, but otherwise little was accomplished. Being away from NL is never a waste though. Fortunately, spring has a high-density of public holidays, providing a good opportunity to get out without spending paid holiday allotment. My company allows remote work for up to two weeks, but I wasn’t comfortable asking for that at the time of booking. My mum was interested in getting out for a break, and I was invited to join!

Given the spring season and short duration of a long weekend, destinations were limited to city breaks – something that isn’t really a priority for either of us at the moment, but that there are several places I’d like to see. And sometimes you just need to roll the dice on mixing up the travel-norms. We bounced between a few ideas, but Visby and Lithuania were the clear frontrunners. Ultimately, we decided to do both!

Lithuanian temperatures had been chilly in the weeks prior to arrival. Summer decided to gatecrash the weekend of the trip though – temperatures soared north of 25C. This meant that the trees were finally starting to bloom, the greenery was a very welcome change from flatland, where it is easy to forget that a country doesn’t need to be entirely concrete and brick. We had quite the interesting AirBnB – it was across the street from the main square, an independant building buried in the centre of courtyard, entirely surrounded by streetfacing buildings. Despite the hot temperatures, inside it was almost cold – likely due to the combination of being heavily sheltered from sun by the exterior walls combined with the thick stone walls of the building itself.

Due to stress resulting from mistakes made during last year’s housing purchase along with my overall deep unhappiness in the Netherlands, I was in a particularly apathetic mood from the start. Unfortunately, this meant that I struggled to make much of the trip. As an example, I had been particularly looking forward to visiting Trakai Castle, a very picturesque and quintessentially Baltic castle situated on an island in the middle of a lake. Despite being only a 30 minute bus ride from town, I just wasn’t able to summon the energy to get out.

Flying out in the early morning, I took the train directly from Schiphol to the office (with the obligatory disruption from NS, of course)…

Vilnius is a fun, and green, little city – I do enjoy the Baltic States. The trip was a reminder of why I’m not really sure that city breaks are currently a good value form of travel for me though. Although, it is distinctly possible this was more tied to my general, ongoing, state of apathy. It was nice to be able to leave the unpleasantness of the Netherlands behind, if only for a couple of days, and Visby remained as an upcoming test of the city break.

I should have contacted my Lithuanian friend in Scotland though – as it turned out, she was home in Lithuania at the time.