Getting Around

...is not as easy as I might have thought (at least, long distance), and we might end up staying domestic (Lithuania only). Apparently, train service keeps getting cut back. There are few international trains, and it seems none of them leave from Klaipeda.

Buses seem better, though a lot of bus routes require that you head to Vilnius (though you may be able to divert before there) and switch buses to go anywhere. Moreover, the bus to Siauliu (one of the places where we could transfer to Riga, Latvia for instance) took 3 1/2 hours to go a little over 100 miles, partly because the road (two lanes) was being worked on, so was unpaved and bumpy for about 15 miles.

Visas are also a problem, at least for Kaliningrad (Russia), and Minsk (Belarus).

We'd like to go to Kaliningrad, but so far we have determined that visas would be very expensive (over $100 each). We're looking into transit visas, but since they require that you provide your itinerary and reservations at your destination, such visas may not be right for us, since they'd see that we're not exactly transiting but simply going in and out in the same day at the same spot.

Local transport is both good and reliable, mostly because we walk. We guesstimated that we walked almost 25 miles in our first 6 days. The buses are frequent, reliable, and inexpensive (40 cents a ride), too.