I’m having a hard time deciding what photos to share as there have been so many great places this year.
I started with a trip to Portugal with my friend Andrea. We spent four days in Lisbon and Ozgur came for my birthday which was a highlight.
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| San Jeronimo Monastery |
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| Ozgur and me celebrating my birthday in Lisbon |
One day we hired a driver to take us to the famous castle at Sintra. When you arrive and look up at the palace it is as if you have stepped into a fairy tale.
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| Palace of Pena |
After touring the castle we went to Cabo da Roca which is the westernmost point of the European continent. It was a fun day of touring and great to spend a few days with him.
Then Andrea and I rented a car and drove north. Our first stop was Obidos, one of the most picturesque and well-preserved medieval towns in Portugal.
From there we went to Nazaré whose coastline is among the most dangerous in the world and is in the Guiness Book of Records for the biggest wave ever surfed at 86 feet. It is hard to imagine people live to tell about it.
In Aveiro we took a boat ride in one of the colorful gondola-like boats along the canal.
Then headed for Porto where we toured the city and took the train one day through the Douro River Valley and a boat ride with vineyards terracing along the hillsides.
We loved Tomar, headquarters of the legendary Knights Templar where we explored the huge castle complex and beautiful gardens.
In Evora we went inside the largest medieval cathedral in Portugal.
Then to Benagil Beach where, we took a hair raising boat ride through the caves. The waves are HUGE and the driver was awesome backing the boat right into the cave sometimes and then having to wait for the right wave to get us back out.
In June I went to Red Deer, Alberta for my nephew’s wedding. It was so great to see my brother and my sister-in-law and family again.
The highlight of the summer was Ana Lilia’s Quinceanera, a traditional which began in Mexico when a young girl turns 15 and leaves her childhood behind. It was a fun event, good food, good music and lots of dancing.
In October I went to The Baltics and Finland and have been busy preserving my memories by making a video.
We started in Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania. We visited the Old Town.
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| Wall of Artists |
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| Cathedral Square |
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| KGB Museum |
We learned about the human chain of thousands of people holding hands, which stretched 370 miles from Vilnius through Riga to Tallinn to protest for independence of the Baltic Countries in 1989.
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| Footprints - symbol of the Chain of Freedom Protest |
We also had the opportunity for a home hosted dinner where we met a family and enjoyed some local cuisine.
We drove to the old medieval capital at Trakai and visited the Trakai island Castle.
We donned aprons and hairnets and learned how to make Kybynlar, a meat pie specific to the region and about the indigenous people who live there.
Next we went to Klaipeda the oldest city in Lithuania and the third largest city. It is important because it is their only major seaport and the northernmost ice-free port on the Baltic Sea for the European Union.
We visited the Hill of Witches, an outdoor gallery located in the midst of the forest where more than 80 carved wooden sculptures, based on mythical figures tell stories of Lithuanian Myths and Legends.
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| The first half is lighthearted fairy tales & legends |
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| The second half features demons, monsters & witches |
Then to the Baltic Sea to see if we could find some amber since the Baltic has the largest deposits of natural Amber in the world.
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| We didn't find any amber but lots of pretty pebbles |
And then to an Amber Gallery where we learned all about amber and made an amber necklace.
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| Making our amber necklaces |
The Cold War Museum located within a former Soviet Bunker was a sobering visit. It only took 22 minutes for them to assemble the war head and be ready to fire the missile.
The Hill of Crosses has a labyrinth of 100,000 crosses, although the exact number would be impossible to count. It began as a place of pilgrimage and a memorial for families who had lost their loved ones in the war of 1831.
Then we were off to Latvia and the capital city of Riga which has some of the highest concentration of Art Nouveau architecture in the world.
We also visited a couple of memorials to the terrible things that happened during the Nazi occupation. Salaspils is a 984 ft monument built by the Soviets which was meant to symbolize the border between life and death and to show how inhumane the Germans were but it is sort of a paradox given the Soviet oppression for the next 30 years.
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| Soviet sculptures; Mother Hiding Children; Solidarity, Protest, The Oath to continue to fight; Unbroken |
And then on to the Rumbula Holocaust Memorial where 25,000 Jews were murdered in two days. It is hard to experience the sites where such atrocities took place but it is so much a part of their culture and fairly recent history that families are still affected by the loss of their loved ones.
We spent a day at a goat farm. The goats were busy eating when we entered the barn but stopped everything to curiously peer at us. We sampled their delicious cheeses, learned about the goats and had lunch.
In Estonia we learned about The Singing Revolution where the people gathered in the thousands and eventually hundreds of thousands to celebrate their heritage in song which was banned by the Soviets. After four years of singing and other acts of protest they achieved something remarkable through a relatively bloodless revolution gaining their independence.
We toured the Old Town of Tallinn with its tangle of historic streets lined with 14 and 15th century buildings, and enjoyed a medieval dinner.
From Tallin we crossed by ferry to Helsinki where we toured the city, the incredible library building and the offshore island of Suomenlinna. I have a friend in Helsinki and was able to have dinner with her. She loves living there.
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| Train Station |
We couldn't get over the fact there is a sauna on the wheel - In Finland there are 5 million people & 3 million saunas
With the main tour over there were only five of us that continued on the post tour and flew to Rovaniemi, Lapland where we were introduced to the Sami indigenous culture.
But first we stopped at the Santa Claus village, had lunch at the Three Elves restaurant, had our photos taken at the Arctic Circle line and monument and then drove another 3 ½ hours north to Inari.
We met a Sami woman at her cozy café. She told us about her life in the forest and sang a song for us. She had also made us lunch of fish she had caught that morning, elk she had hunted herself along with all the trimmings, needless to say we were really impressed.
We visited a reindeer farm where we met Jenni, a young woman who told us about her life and her reindeer. She does several crafts and showed us how to take the skin from the leg of the reindeer and make shoes.
At the Siida Arctic Museum we saw the exhibits that preserve the culture of the Sami people and some videos of daily life. The Sami lands traverse Sweden, Norway, Finland and Russia.
Our final adventure was to a Husky farm. Anni told us about her dogs, she has 46 of them. The dogs love to run and she has to exercise them every day or every other day so runs three teams. They run about 25 miles each time so she can do one in the morning and one in the afternoon. She made dinner for us.
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| They definitely think they are part of the family |
It has been a very eventful year and I am blessed to be still enjoying good health and the ability to travel. It is fun to have a 19 year old roommate and hear all about life at the University of Washington from Robert who is in his second year. I am also still doing my Zumba classes twice a week and love it.
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