I had been planning all week to take J to Trakai, a city with a giant old castle about 30 km from Vilnius. Sunday, was H's only day off, and I like to get J and I out on adventures on his days off so he can sleep. I was planning to take the train both ways, after a successful train ride to Kaunas for the zoo, and was really looking forward to it. Here's a picture of it from their tourism website.
What is it they say, life is what happens when you're making other plans?
To begin with, J woke at three am for the second day in a row. I have no idea what this is about, but I'm guessing it's either an intellectual growth spurt, or the whole nighttime peeing thing still. I don't really care, but I'm kind of tired of it.
Then, I checked the weather and it called for Thunderstorms all day. I figured, thunderstorms pass quickly, and the weather forecast is always wrong over here, so I packed our things. I checked the train schedule, and our choices were to leave at 8 am and be ther 90 minutes before the castle even opened, or wait until 1:30 and deal with a crabby kid and being rushed in the afternoon. I couldn't even get the bus schedule to load online, but the receptionist at our hotel/apartments called some unknown bus gurus, and wrote the outbound schedule down, which was roughly every 20 minutes from the station.
So at 9:30, stroller raincover and handwritten schedule in hand, J and I went to the bus station. We tried to buy tickets for Trakai, and the ticket lady said we had to go to information. Information said it was a holiday, apprently for summer solstice, and the next bus was in an hour. She said I had to wait two minutes to buy the ticket. I was confused until I realized I was really waiting for the ticket-selling girl to come back. The ticket girl started to sell me a ticket for an earlier bus, and I was worried about getting confused, but after much conversation between info girl and ticket girl, it was decided I could take the earlier bus. Apparently, the reason info girl didn't offer it to me as a choice is I had to buy the ticket on the bus. Why would that even matter?
J was very excited to get on the bus, never having been on one, and we got decent seats by an open window in the back, and the Quinny Zapp stowed nicely under the seats. We even had Americans sitting in front of us, although I didn't talk to them until later.
Things went pretty smoothly, and for the low price of about 50 cents USD, we were on our way. The bus stopped a few times picking up people, and the only truly smelly person near us at least only rode for about 20 minutes. A man got on with a rolled up carpet and sat right behind us. I quickly realized the carpet was soaked in cat pee. Yum. And then he had a sneezing fit, which sprayed all over my neck. Now, I'm not a huge germophobe, but I don't share drinks and I use a paper towel to open public restroom doors on my way out. So being sneezed on by Cat Pee Man made me shudder.
J fell asleep and had a nice 40-minute nap on the way there, and the American women in fron of me helped me get all our stuff out. It was a 2km walk to the castles, and we had fun stopping along the way to throw rocks in the water. We also saw a swan family. Swans are gigantic. I had no idea.
We toured the castle, and J was mostly excited by the cannons and rocks in the courtyard. I thought he barely noticed the castle, but at bedtime he told H all about the different things we saw. H had filmed there a few years ago, and I had visited set, so I took a few shots of J in some of the locations. Like, "Daddy assassinated a monk here!"
We tried to get a sailboat , with a skipper of course, to go out on the lake, but even though I offered to pay the full group rate, the guy in charge refused to let us go out. I have no idea why, since the entire time I was there not a single one of his boats was rented. Maybe it's a front for Russian Mafia money.
We had lunch by the lake, and J was very friendly with the other children around us, just picking up things and naming them. "Apple! Baby! Fork!" He was trying to teach them English. How cute.
I planned on taking the train back, to avoid any rush hour traffic, but right as we got to the bus station, to walk past it, a HUGE downpour started and I thought we'd better stick to the bus. Like I said, it was a holiday, and I didn't want to walk the ten minutes to the train station in a thunderstorm, have there be no train, and then have to walk back and have missed the bus.
The bus came a few minutes later, packed full of people, and I realized we would have to stand all the way home, about an hour's drive in a bus. So we got in a cab, while J screamed "I want to take the bus!" intending to just go to the train station. We ended up taking it all the way home, but it was so worth it.
The taxi driver told us he had a brother who lived in Florida, and then put in a disco 80's DVD for us to watch. Very entertaining. They have these driver's on-board DVD players here, and I'm not sure if it's for the driver to watch or the passengers, but it's always entertaining.
Overall a great day, and J slept until 6 this morning, so I'm feeling like an entirely new person. Now it's time to shower while J watches Bits and Bobs.
Thanks for reading,
Anne
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