Ch 2-3 On Our Way - Air Lithuania

Was I ever in for a surprise. After some initial confusion at the gate as there were two flights leaving for Lithuania at the same time – one for the capital city Vilnius and the other for Palanga, things were fine. Once on board it turned into a truly pleasant flight.

After a short time in the air we are served a cold plate for dinner.  Lovely sandwiches made of hearty rye bread, smoked salmon and garnish.  And to sweeten the palate, a tasty candy made by Kraft Foods in Lithuania – somehow reassuring to know that capitalists already made inroads. For our beverage we get a beer.  It is simple.  It is delightful.  It tastes wonderful. The staff is attentive in a sort of throwback to what air travel was like years ago. The plane itself is an older American model evidenced by the English language warning signs and markings.

I had no idea what awaited us in Lithuania.   At least at this point in my life when traveling I have cash and charge cards so what problems can't be solved by money? This is a far cry from my student days where cash was tight and traveling cheap meant a lot of waiting for trains and hostels entry. No longer do we have to worry about being hauled off by the Stasi, or KGB, or whatever just because we are Americans, or do we?  Are remnants of the old guard lurking in doorways waiting to nab us innocents and hold us for ransom a warning as the U.S. Consulate in Germany warned me about the DDR. 

Anyway, just how bad could a place be that's on the internet?  Remember this is the early days of the net. It’s the first time I’ve used the internet for travel arrangements.  I did have to write the bed and breakfast for confirm our reservations, but I saw photos of the house online.  Amazing how quickly countries that didn't have personal telephone service became wired.

Mom worries about visiting the country she remembers from fifty-five years ago. It exists only in memories, a place where she never stayed in a hotel, owned a car or ate in restaurants.  Transport was by horse cart, foot, bike or train. She knows the stories about Germans who traveled back in recent years when it was still a Soviet satellite. They tell of poverty, desolation and the difficulty to secure any sort of transport.  Mentally she is prepared for scenes similar to what she experienced on her trips to East Germany years ago – a colorless socialist monolith; streets full of sullen, expressionless people; everyone cautious about what they said and who they spoke with.

Why didn’t we go to Lithuania years earlier when it was still communist?  We simply couldn’t.  On this side you’d end up with a knock on the door from the FBI, as happened to me after my first visit to East Germany.  Driving in East Germany on a visit I asked cousin Horst about the lack of road signs along the highway. He claimed it was intentional; the government figured locals knew where they had to go but they didn’t want to make things easy in case the country was invaded. Everyone knows invading East Germany was a high priority for the Americans, right? More likely it was due to a shortage of materials. Nor did our family have contacts in Lithuania. There were no family members left alive in East Prussia.

It would have been ever so much easier for us to take one of the tour groups originating out of Germany. There is a lot of interest in Germany among former inhabitants, like my mother, to go back and revisit their homeland.  But these tours only go to the major cities and our interest is out in the hinterlands. And I simply couldn’t stand being stuck with a group of elderly Germans for any length of time.  It might have been interesting to hear their tales of life back then, but the structure of a tour group would prove constrictive. So we will see it our way, at our pace, with Mom as tour guide.