Return to Kaunas Jan 2023

Return with Catharine to Lithuania 2023

The plan is to return to Kaunas, this time with Catharine, to have a week visiting the Kaunas region of Lithuania and to go for a checkup with Nord Orthopaedics team and to give them some feedback on my TKR revision from January 24 last year.

Yesterday we set off from home on stage 1 of our trip taking our dog Jazz to our sons work  so that they can look after him while we are away. 

We checked the traffic at Britannia Bridge before setting off from Star Autocare, Gaerwen. Our departure time from the garage was well judged with very little delay getting off Anglesey, usually a problem with the closure of the Menai Bridge since last year. And We were lucky with the remains of the journey to Catharine’s Niece's house in Warrington. They had kindly offered to deliver us to the airport in time for the flight this morning. So we had a good evening catching up with them all and a comfortable overnight sleep.

We are now onboard the light from Liverpool to Kaunas, Ryanair 09:55 which took off 2 minutes early. I was refused permission to take my computer bag through check in as I was not a priority boarder. 

The flight is due into Kaunas at 14:30 local time (EET) 2 hours earlier than GMT. I changed my phone onto EET to see how much longer we are in the air, but I couldn't see the document as I hadn’t made it visible offline.

As we disembarked we had quite a long wait in the queue for passport control, but as we passed through there were two taxis from Nord Clinic waiting for their passengers. As I had not arranged to be collected we were asking for directions to the bus stop but then the taxi driver put two and two together and realised when he ran my phone and I answered that we were the ones he was waiting for. So we were transported to our apartment here in Kaunas directly!

The entry details for the accommodation were not quite as precise as we would have liked but eventually we twiggeed we were at the wrong door. The smart lock also had us confused on exit but we got the hang of it as we started our walk to Lidl to do some shopping.

 

Before setting off we had been looking at how to get to the old city centre and I forgot to change the destination as we set off to Lidl. A bit of a detour climbing a huge flight of concrete steps before I realised the error of my ways and stopped Google maps, restarting it to find Lidl. Snow was mostly cleared from the roads but the pavements were still covered in a thin layer of snow making some areas quite slippery. 

Lidl was just beyond an indoor market with some interesting shops, including a IKEA in a very modern building . Once in Lidl we realised that our lack of linguistic skills in Lithuanian made it quite difficult to read the food labels! Lidl's bakery included dark Rye Bread, one of my favourites when in Europe.

Armed with our shopping we took the more direct route back to the apartment and had a cup of tea while we planned our evening event.

The apartment is 'bijou' approx 10 mx 5m with a separate  shower room and toilet adjacent to the double bed. The kitchen has a couple of interesting items with a drying rack inside the cupboard. Very good value at around £55 per night.

Once we had got ourselves sorted out we walked back past Lidl towards the southern part of Kaunas where we looked for a restaurant which would take our fancy. Eventually we found Avilys which seemed well attended and was open with just two tables left. The food was absolutely fantastic; duck with beetroot and blackberry sauce and a concoction of garlic potato which was very thinly sliced and reconstituted in an oblong block.

Main course at Avilys

Ice cream at Avilys

The restaurant is in the brick vaulted cellar of the building and is a home brewery too. Some people were getting beer served in a significant ‘yard of ale’.

Our table was next to a young English chap with his mum and I stopped and had a chat with them on my way to pay our bill. The meal was superb and the cost was very reasonable at €66 including one of their beers and a bottle of sparkling water.

The walk back to the apartment is now becoming very familiar and seems to take no time at all. The fuel stations here all have LPG and the price here is very reasonable, €0.65/ltr compoared to the UK average rate of £0.9/ltr