Saturday, May 30 โ Riga, Latvia
Our youngest son spent six months in Latvia in 2023, as a member of the PPCLI and part of a forward-deployed NATO battle group. Walking the streets of Riga, we felt that in a way we hadn’t anticipated. For Meg especially, knowing he had stood in some of these same squares and looked up at some of these same rooftops gave the day a quiet personal weight alongside everything else the city had to offer.
Latvia’s history earns that weight. Like its Baltic neighbours Lithuania and Estonia, it has spent much of the past several centuries being absorbed, occupied, or fought over by larger powers. Liberated from German occupation in 1945 by the Soviet Red Army โ which then simply declined to leave. Latvia exchanged one form of subjugation for another and did not regain its independence until 1990. Walking through a city that beautiful, knowing what it endured to still be standing, makes the cobblestones feel different underfoot.
We were docked well up the river, closer to the old town than the cruise line apparently expected. They were offering a shuttle for โฌ 12 per person that would have taken us about a kilometre into town. We declined and walked instead, following the river into the centre and arriving in considerably better spirits than we would have had we handed over โฌ 24 for the privilege.
On to town and an amazing market
The old town delivered everything you’d expect: ancient churches, a castle, a fraternity hall, squares that invite you to stand still for a moment. We did all of that, then wandered beyond the old moat into quieter neighbourhoods where the architecture shifted and the tourist density dropped considerably. The central market was our mid-morning stop โ too early for lunch, but perfectly timed for local berries that were just coming into season and absolutely worth the detour.
We found an open-air cafรฉ in the sunshine, settled in with a rhubarb lemonade that tasted exactly like a warm Saturday afternoon should, and watched Riga go about its day. By the time we returned to the ship for the 3 PM departure, we’d logged eighteen thousand steps. The weather helped โ twenty degrees and brilliant sunshine โ but Riga would have impressed us in any conditions. It’s a city that clearly loves itself, and it’s hard not to love it back.
Sunday, May 31 โ Tallinn, Estonia
We started the morning with ambitions of breakfast on the rear deck. It was twelve degrees with a breeze off the Baltic, which our optimism had rounded up to “brisk but manageable.” The food was cold before we finished it. We retreated inside, layered up properly, and headed ashore with a significantly more realistic assessment of the temperature.
Tallinn’s old town is frequently cited as the finest medieval city in northern Europe, and having now seen it, we’re not inclined to argue โ though we’d happily put Riga and even Klaipฤda into the conversation. What set Tallinn apart wasn’t the headlines โ the towers, the walls, the church spires โ but the texture of the place. Fat Margaret’s Tower. Saint Olaf’s Church, its steeple a classical image of the Estonian skyline. The market square before ten in the morning, before the cruise ship crowds arrive, when it still belongs to the city rather than to the visitors.
Meg is locked away in a castle – can Cam save her?
At Munkadetagune Torn (the Tower Behind Monks) we entered for an adventure. The original medieval stairs were steep, narrow and uneven underfoot. There were none of the safety infrastructure that tends to smooth the edges off historic sites elsewhere. It felt genuinely old, in the best possible way. Meg and I separated briefly โ she continued along the ramparts while I went down to get a photograph of her from below. Classic Rapunzel moment. What followed was less classic.
When Meg reached the exit, she found the door locked and a handwritten note on a paper plate readingย ‘Back in 15 minutes’.ย Stranded on the ramparts with no way down, she leaned out a window. I was approaching the entrance below when the attendant popped out heading on an apparent coffee run. I mentioned, as diplomatically as possible, that my wife was stranded on the ramparts. “That is not possible,” she said, and wandered off down the street. I looked up at Meg in the window and laughed, because there wasn’t much else to do.
She was eventually released. Regrouping, we followed a sign into the courtyard of the Dominican museum โ not for the exhibits, but because the sign said Cloister Red Ale. A brewery operating out of a thirteenth-century cloister, producing twenty-litre batches of ale that regularly sells out. This, to us, felt like exactly the right use of medieval infrastructure. We sampled. We approved. We sat for a long and very pleasant pause in a building that has been standing since 1246.
Treading lightly on 900 years of history
Meg noted that after two months of beautifully reconstructed historic buildings across Europe, stepping into a genuinely original structure felt almost transgressive โ as though the space didn’t quite belong to us, but to the centuries of people who’d passed through it before. The courtyard was guarded by what may have been the largest dog either of us has ever encountered: Great Dane height, Saint Bernard build, a reported sixty-five kilograms, a Caucasian Shepherd apparently used by the Russian military in Siberia. He was docile enough. Probably.
We finished the day at the local market โ a proper one, with butchers and produce sellers alongside the quick bites โ before walking back to the ship along the old tram track, now a green corridor through the city. Sunset that evening was at 10:20 PM. It never really got dark. Another Baltic country, another day that exceeded expectations.
Next up: Helsinki, Finland, and Stockholm, Sweden โ the final two ports before our Baltic cruise comes to an end.
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Travel thought – “The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.”โ Marcel Proust
Cam and Meg.