Day 7 - memorial

Once the housekeeping duties of waste disposal etc had been done we left the site to visit the memorial for the 50,000 Lithuanians who were shot there during the Nazi occupation of 1941-44. 30,000 were Jewish. There were art installations and pictures in memory of those who had been deported by the Russians to Siberia in 1941. Access to the museum was closed, it being Monday.

The sun shone as we headed west on the A1 motorway towards the port of Klaipeda from where we got the 5 minute ferry €41 return across the lagoon to the long sand spit Curonia. It’s a strange place, pine-covered sand with dunes at some places on the lagoon side then smaller ones in the western Baltic side. There was a €30 feet to enter the spit area. The road runs through the forest all the way to Nida, and though it stretches about 60 miles, Nida is as far as we can go. The rest is Russia - Kaliningrad.

We stopped part way down at Hill of the Witches, a forest walk where there are apparently 80 wooden sculptures of assorted ghouls and goblins. It was only 2 miles but gave us a nice leg stretch and broke up the drive.

P4N had a place for us going through a car park then slightly into a clearing where there’s a beach volleyball pitch and space to park up. It’s perfect as it gets light and sun and isn’t crowded in by the trees. We’d read the only camp site has 100 pitches and there’s construction work next to it going on all the hours of daylight so we’re grateful to be here.

We parked up and walked the 5 minutes to the beach (we can hear the waves from the van) and I had a paddle. I’ve paddled in the Baltic when we visited Arclight in Helsinki and also after seeing Jan Harling in Sweden. I’m happy to tell you the Baltic wasn’t baltic!

My Reform cousin Duncan tells me thanks to the move right in France I’ll get more € for my £. He’s a lost cause.

It’s so nice to be sitting in the sun out of the wind with my book waiting to be read. I’ll be on cook duty later but till then I’m relaxed.

175 miles today