ROAD TO RIGA, LATVIA
We were ready for breakfast at a beautiful nearby cafe at 8 a.m.. I was too ravenous to take a photograph of my breakfast but the Estonian invitation to the British for breakfast was marvelous: two fried eggs, garlic toast, bacon, sausage, blood pudding, hash brown patty, hollandaise sauce, fried tomato. Then we took the tram to the bus station. Electric street cars on rails down the center of the street are the preferred mode of city travel in each of these Baltic countries, as it once was in Asheville. We never learned how to pay. Just pay on the tram with your chip card I was told. I waved my credit card around not knowing what to do while the tram full of people watched my confusion and then watched me, without a murmer, give up without paying the 1.50 euro for each of us. The bus station was elegant with all kinds of food and our LUX bus for our four hour bus ride to Riga had Wifi that worked flawlessly to send yesterday’s post, a toilet down the steps into the bowels of the bus, a free coffee/tea/hot chocolate machine and very comfortable seats with an airplane type screen with all kinds of entertainment and a map that showed just where we were all the way along. We stopped only briefly a couple of places.
Unlike the old walled cities of Tallinn and Riga, the steep roofed rural houses along the road and the occasional strip malls looked pretty ordinary and not wealthy at all. But most of the four lane highway was through miles of pine forests. And then finally we arrived in Riga with a short walk to our Airbnb. This is what we see out of our fourth floor Airbnb.
BILLYBABA’S WANDERING 