retiredmartin

May 2023.

Day 3 of the Baltic Explorer, and a 4:20 hr trip straight south from Tallinn to Riga through an endless forest of newly planted birch and hazel. About £20 each on a Lux coach that didn’t quite mean “luxury” but at least had intermittent WiFi and leg room.

Mrs RM had wanted to take a 10 hour “party bus” that wobbled its way down to Latvia via lots of exciting detours but they declined our enquiry, possible because we were too old to party. If only they knew…

A revisit to Riga, the first visit on a Baltic cruise in 2011, and since then they’ve smartened the coach terminal and added a DIY pizza machine.

I hope it’s better than the automatic chip dispenser that graced Cambridge station for about a month.

Riga’s pride and joy remains the giant Zeppelin hangers, of which more later.

Our first target was to negotiate the cobbled streets,

and find an apartment which seemed thrillingly close to St Peters,

And indeed it was, (albeit up six flights of stairs), but only after I’d used a duff Booking.com map to take us down blind alleys with signs saying “No Stags”, which tells you how Latvia sees itself outgrowing its historic reputation as the new “piss-up in a pretty place capital of Europe” (that mantle has been passed on to Sheffield).

This led to the inevitable argument about me being “impatient”, an argument I skilfully lost.

Mrs RM retrieved her tick-list,

We kicked off with a pre-emptive tick of the four Bremen musicians.

Across the church square was Banshee, a brand new craft bar and another pre-emptive tick, which seemed to specialise in orange murk, a change from the sour obsession in Tallinn.

Nothing cheap, but plenty local.

Mrs RM liked the airy, modern styling; I thought my murk a little thin,

but the Aussie indie-folk was quaint,

and the view was worth the euro premium.

“Shall we stay for another ?”

“No”