Sunday, December 29, 2013

Guidebooks or the Web?

Here is a good article from the Sunday, 12/29/13, NYT Travel section on using guidebooks or the Web for travel planning.  It really is a false choice:  we always use both.

But, we wouldn't even think of going on a trip without our guidebooks.  Our two favorites are the Lonely Planet and Rick Steves.  Whenever possible we bring a Streetwise map as well.

For our upcoming trip to Riga and Vilnius we picked up the Lonely Planet Baltics and I got Rick Steves' Northern European Cruise ports from the library for his section on Riga ("undiscovered gem!") since he doesn't have a separate Baltic book.

There is a Latvian Lutheran church and school in Wauwatosa, about 12 blocks from our house that has services in Latvian three weekends a month.  We'll get in touch with them for some advice on Riga and a crash course in Latvian.

Their church was on the Windows Into Wauwatosa tour last year and we stopped in.  They were understandably quite proud that they had a thriving congregation and about 20 students in their school.

Who'd have thought there would be a Latvian community in Wauwatosa?

Wednesday, December 18, 2013

Vacation 2014

We finally decided on our 2014 vacation destination for 2014:  Riga, Latvia.  We'll spend 2 -3 days in either Tallinn, Estonia or Vilnius, Lithuania: we haven't decided which.  We already bought tickets.

Our flights are excellent:  Chicago to Stockholm to Riga and the layover in Stockholm is just over a two hours.  We're flying SAS.  (It would have been cool to fly Lufthansa, the airline of the Hanseatic League)

Now it's time for research.

The vacation begins once you decide where to go!