We thoroughly enjoyed our three-week trip through the Baltic nations of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. The countries are beautiful, the people friendly, and the food is excellent. This area should be on everyone’s travel list. All three countries have small and dwindling populations.

While friends back in Porto suffered unusually hot weather, we had fall weather with some sun, some rain, and several overcast days.

We flew into Tallinn, Estonia. After a few days in that gorgeous old town, we drove around the countryside north and south of the city for 3 days.

We then took the train from Tallinn down to Riga, Latvia. Riga also has a pretty Old Town with great architecture plus a modern side of the city across the river. It is a popular cruise ship and hen/stag party destination.

From there we drove first to Cesis in the Gaujas national park of Latvia for a couple nights. Then we headed into Lithuania and stayed in Vilnius and Kaunas before stopping the last nights at the old resort town of Jūrmala, Latvia before catching a direct Air Baltic flight back to Porto.

In all three countries we saw passionate public support for the people of Ukraine. The Baltic countries know first-hand the pain of Russian (and German) occupation. Indeed, one night in Kaunas, we were woke-up by an alert on our phones as we heard NATO fighter jets scrambling overhead. They shot down an errant armed drone about 7 miles from where we were staying.

The most poignant and lasting memory from this trip will be of our visit to the Paneriai Memorial. In these serene woods, between July 1941 and August 1944, Paneriai became the mass murder site of an estimated 70,000 Jews, 20,000 Polish, and 8,000 Russian POWs plus Romas and others (numbers reported vary.) They were shot by German squads and local collaborators, then dumped into pits. The sheer number of senseless murders is mind-numbing. In some cases, whole Lithuanian villages were eliminated. The three countries lost 15-30% of their population and almost the entire native Jewish population to systematic murder by the Nazis during World War 2. What happened here was just as horrific as what happened in the concentration camps, but is much less heard about in the West.

Many others were deported to Siberia during the two Soviet occupations. The locals like to say “The Soviets came to liberate us from the Nazis, but forgot to leave.”

This was the first trip where I did not take my heavy “real” camera (I call the boat anchor) and only used my cellphone. This was a big change for me. Below is less than 30% of the photos I kept.