Lithuania: Aukštojas Hill (17/28)
We had descended Sněžka early enough to get a good chunk of the driving across Poland under our belts. This was all going well until after prolonging a toilet stop until I really did have to stop, but we managed to stop at the same time as a tour bus. The two free toilets had a queue out the door, but we had no Polish zloty so half an hour of queuing it was.
Our luck did not improve as five minutes before our intended stop for the night we witnessed a car accident. Luckily no one was hurt and we weren’t involved thanks to Olly’s quick braking, but there was a lot of waiting around for the police to turn up. We both thought hanging around would be pointless but the right thing to do, this was confirmed when the police turned to us and rolled their eyes and turned away again when we said we didn’t speak any Polish.
After a late night we got up and headed for the Lithuanian border. We stopped at a tourist information just over the border where the toilets were payable in euros. The guy from the info desk was very helpful and said he thought the van would need a vignette to drive on some roads in Lithuania. We had come to the conclusion we didn’t need one but he showed me the website and even printed out pages of vignette information for us. Even so we weren’t sure we did need one, but bought a 24hour vignette for six euros just in case.
Out first stop in Lithuania was the Trakai Island Castle, this 14th century castle held great strategic importance as it is the only island castle in Eastern Europe.
The castle was a pretty popular tourist destination but it still felt quite calm and quiet. We walked past all the advertisements for cruises where each of the captains wore fake, comical captain’s hats.
We had a walk around the castle but decided to not pay the entry fee, instead I suggested that we should get a different view of the castle from the water. Olly not wanting to crush my pedaloing dreams (or not wanting to hear me complain afterwards) gave in and we compromised by only peddling for half an hour, just enough time to circumnavigate the castle. We also had an ice cream which I thought was particularly tasty.
Our next task was to tackle Lithuania’s highest peak, Aukstojas Hill. En-route, we spotted an info board and a boulder, this turned out to be the old highest point, 500m down the road we parked up and walked over to the new highest peak. There were suspicions as far back as 1985 that the old highest peak was not the highest, however suspicion was not confirmed until a team of specialists from the institute of Geodesy at Vilnius Gediminas Technical University measured the peak using GPS technology in 2004. The old highest peak was measured at 292.7m high, however 500m away a higher point of 293.84m existed. This became Lithuania’s new highest point. The new info sign states that everything is highest on the higher hill; both the pine tree, and the oak tree, and the hazel are the highest in Lithuania and in the autumn the highest ripe nut can be found!
There is another commemorative boulder and even a viewing tower here.
With another peak ticked off we headed to Vilnius, the capital. We arrived late in the afternoon to a car park we had researched online. This was already busy with all sorts of caravans and campers. We did have to laugh at the Italian woman shouting what looked to be pretty unhelpful instructions to her husband whilst he was reversing with the windows up.
We headed into town for the evening and ticked off the sights. The architecture is very varied from the unusual neoclassical cathedral to the gothic St Anne’s church.
We both felt a very good vibe from Vilnius, it seemed to have a young, hipster feel about it. We decided to have dinner in town and tried some local beer and the local speciality which was potato dumplings. There seemed to be a lot of fancy ice cream stalls which I was quite surprised at considering the average temperature in Vilnius for half the year is below 0.
After a little too much of a lie in we headed towards the Latvian border. We realised after setting off our ETA for crossing the border was two minutes later than when our 24hour vignette expired.
‘No problem’ said Olly we will just do the max speed possible and make up some time. As copilot I did some googling to check the speed limit, after guessing we were on a motorway rather an expressway we did a solid 130 km/h across Lithuania. This did put a dent in our miles per gallon and I was trying to calculate how much of a drop would make it cheaper to just buy another 6 euro vignette. I never did finish this calculation but we crossed the border at exactly 24 hours to the minute after we had purchased our vignette.