Lithuania
As tourist sites have gotten more crowded we look more and more for the unusual and not so touristy places to visit. We weren’t sure what Lithuania was going to be like to but we were absolutely amazed and enjoyed our trip so much.
We flew into Vilnius and stayed in a perfect location for exploring the city by foot. The city is vibrant and very environmentally friendly, our hotel even gave us a refillable water bottle for our room with water filling stations on each floor. And the city was very pedestrian and bike friendly. One of the things that really stood out to us was a park on the river where hundreds of adults and kids of all ages were skateboarding, playing basketball, volleyball, hanging out and enjoying life without phones. It was so nice to see people, young and old, genuinely happy and content. The other thing we noticed was how clean the city was, there was never any trash on the sidewalks or streets.
The top highlights before we headed off to Kaunus were:
Museum of Occupation and Freedom Fights, where we learned about the Soviet and German occupations of Lithuania during the 20th century.
Gediminas Tower - It’s worth climb to see the views of Vilnius. There is a funicular that you can ride to the top, although it wasn’t in operation when we were there.
Vingis Park
Old Town
On our way to Kaunus we stopped at Trakai Castle, which is the small castle on an island in such a cute town. It was the perfect detour.
We loved exploring Kaunus from the Old Town to views of the city from Resurrection Church we enjoyed our stay. Our hotel was right off a beautiful pedestrian walkway with shops, beautiful trees and flowers and in the evenings there were musicians performing. Kaunus Castle was small, but worth the quick stop and we enjoyed walking through a farmer’s market and a beautiful park right next to the castle.
We took a quick overnight drive to Klaipeda, which is right on the Baltic Sea. A small, but beautiful port town with lots of cool art and sculptures around town.
There is a small portion of Russia on the Baltic Sea that borders Lithuania so we had to drive to the border crossing on our way back to Vilnius, just so we could say we looked into Russia. Many years ago we had planned a trip to Moscow and with the state of affairs in the world we may have missed our opportunity.
We had such an amazing visit to Lithuania, I could definitely see us going back to explore the country more!
Jen & Brendan {April 2025}