It’s a fairly long way to Vilnius from Spain.
You have to go via Warsaw or Helsinki or even Moscow, but Moscow involves a transit visa, and it means flying over Vilnius in order to come right back again, several hours later. Such graceless inefficiency offends me.
And … if there is one cast-iron rule of travel it is this: never take a route that requires a visa unless you have absolutely no choice.
I could have gone via London or Amsterdam. These options were somewhere north of 27 hours each way. My computer presented them anyway, with a straight face, as if I might seriously consider them.
No sense of the ridiculous – one of the many problems with Windows 10.
From my analysis (I looked out the plane window as we came in to land), I’d say that Lithuania has a lot of trees.
I got to my hotel (The Congress) late afternoon on a Sunday.
I am not the sort to dismiss a hotel as little more than a place to sleep. I spend a lot of time in my room because if I didn’t I would be in restaurants eating and drinking too much.
For the business traveller, there are two choices in the evenings: too much food and alcohol, or sitting in your room watching CNN.
I travel enough that each trip does not feel like the only opportunity I’m ever going to get to eat out in a restaurant … and so I ration that pleasure … and believe it or not, I like going for a run and then sipping nutritional powder dissolved in 200 ml of water in my room while watching the news in Lithuanian.
I would prefer to have a beer and a burger but you can’t live life that way, you have to have the self-discipline to avoid immediate gratification, force yourself to do exercise and limit your access to things that you know are bad for you.
Although in this case I was knackered and starving, so I went to the restaurant and had a beer and a burger.
