Day 7 Eating Bambi and Castle in the Middle of Nowhere

Painted ceiling in the palace

Duke's potty chair. Yes this is his elegant commode. Lift the lid....


Entering the palace from the front

The pink salon

Tulip garden in the rear garden

Hill of Crosses

Up close

Today was mostly a driving day. We drove from Vilnius, Lithuania to Riga, Latvia. We stopped three times on the way.

First stop – Hill of Crosses

This place is in Lithuania not too far from the Latvian border. I’m not sure the exact year that this tradition was started but people started putting crosses on a small hill in the middle of a very rural area. I do know that it was during the Soviet occupation. The purpose of the crosses was to commemorate people who had died and to also really bug the Soviets as anything that related to religion really made them grumpy. The people were successful, the Soviets got really grumpy so much so that they bulldozed the crosses to destroy them.

Of course the Lithuanians immediately replaced the crosses and everyone got into the act. They put crosses of all sizes on the hill and rosary beads, etc. Finally the Soviets just gave up and let them be. Eventually this became a huge attraction – must be a little like Lourdes. People from all over come and put more crosses on the hill. There are walkways through them. Most of them have writing on them identifying who is honored and where the people are from who put them there. There are hundreds of thousands on the hill. Pope John Paul visited the site some years ago (when he was alive) to say some prayers.

It was pretty cold and windy during our visit but it didn’t rain.

Second Stop – Eating Bambi

We stopped at a “Deer Farm” near the Latvian border. This is a very pretty place with very attractive modern buildings and quaint bridge over a slow moving river. There are beautiful green pastures with herds of deer and beautiful horses. The farm raises deer for its restaurant and for sale and also horses which they say are only for riding.

We had lunch there which was actually quite good – deer meatballs. We were told that the deer are slaughtered at six years old and up until then they have had a very happy life.

Third Stop – Castle in the middle of nowhere

In rural Latvia there is a palace modeled on Versaille – Rundele Palace and Park. It is huge and very impressive. We went for a tour of the Palace and its gardens. The Palace was the summer home of the Duke who possessed a huge piece of real estate and I guess was the ruler of those parts. Apparently the way he came into this position was that he was “the favorite” of Catherine the Great. Although “favorite” was never fully explained I think it was pretty obvious.

Our guide told us that Catherine’s husband was impotent and so after eight years she had him killed. The Duke was married to someone else but I guess that Duchess was satisfied with having a palace in place of a faithful husband. The palace is huge and furnished very lavishly.

Apparently its current grandeur is the result of being restored after many years of being treated badly by the German soldiers and the Soviet ones. It certainly is pretty gorgeous now. It is so fancy that we had to put on paper booties over our shoes.

After this stop we proceeded to Riga, Latvia.