Baltic Sea 2022

Vilnius, Lithuania – Warsaw, Poland

A rustic farmhouse, glimpsed near the Polish border.
Train connections are difficult or not operating, so we opt for a bus. The Flixbus has no monitor, or coffee. The bathroom becomes quite ‘fruity’ by the end of the 8h journey. We had forgotten about the time change to Poland, putting the clocks back an hour, and adding an hour to our expected journey. There is no Internet. So Cindy and I listen to several old BBC podcasts on scientific subjects. The scenery is forests, as we pass very close to the Belorussian border, scene of the migrant crisis of the last year, before winding our way into the narrow Suwalki gap between that dictatorship and Kaliningrad, an isolated region of another dictatorship. Then we are in Poland. There is a cursory border control of passports, and soon the countryside opens up to rolling hills of farmland. It is all very ‘tidy’ and well cared for.
Kaliningrad was Königsberg till 1946, and is the largest city in the Kaliningrad Oblast (Oblast is Russian for region of province). It was founded in 1255 by the Teutonic Knights during the Northern Crusades, and the ‘König’ in the name refers to King Ottokar II of Bohemia (1233 – 1278, reigned 1253-1278), who led the two crusade expeditions against the pagans.

To see more of this trip on the Travelogue, click here: Baltic Sea 2022