Portugal, Spain and Baltic Cruise: Gotland Island, Sweden & Klaipeda, Lithuania

On Friday, we arrived at the Swedish Island of Gotland early in the afternoon. We docked at the town of Visby which normally has about 85,000 inhabitants but this week is the time of the annual medieval festival with thousands of visitors, mostly dressed in medieval outfits. They were dancing, picnicking and enjoying a huge fair selling all kinds of medieval things. Actually it looked quite authentic amongst the old buildings within the walled city - that is until a medieval person pulled out their mobile phone!! We thought the little boys would have liked the wooden swords and knights armour to play with, but couldn't fit it in the cases! Sorry boys! It was quite a warm day and after a long walk over cobbled stones and up and down stairs, we were pretty hot - so of course, Jim stripped down to his undies and went for a swim off one of the rocky beaches.

By 6 we were back on board and setting sail for Lithuania. We have enjoyed every meal - breakfast, lunch and dinner up on the outside deck, with some roof & side cover, watching the beautiful sunsets, watching the pilot who guides our ship out of each port jump from our ship to his boat & watching the amazing scenery of islands & coastline pass by.

On Saturday morning we arrived in Lithuania at the port city of Klaipeda. We chose to do a tour of the Cold War museum which was 1 1/2 hours drive from the port out in the wooded country side. This museum was formerly a Russian Missile Base from 1963 until 1978, hidden underground amidst forest and pig farms. Here the Russians had missiles ready to fire at various European cities if Moscow gave the order. Four deep silos for firing the missiles & a maze of underground rooms were dug out by hand shovels by 10,000 Estonians bought into Lithuania by the Russians. The reason for this was that the Estonians couldn't speak Lithuanian and only a small amount of Russian so they couldn't tell the locals any secrets about what was going on there. Everything was built to make it hard to detect from the air, but satellite maps showed that the Americans knew about the base. It was a fascinating tour to see up close what the Soviets were up to during the Cold War - no missile was fired from that base fortunately.

Back at the town, we had time to explore the local streets & Dad found a good coffee place for us (with Jim & Fi). Despite having a bit of Lithuanian glass already, we couldn't resist some Baltic Amber which is the main souvenir of this area. The other 4 of our group had done a walking tour of the city in the morning.

All aboard again and overnight we sail to Gdansk in Poland.