In Courtenay: The deer keep jumping out fence and eating the grass in the paddock. I think that one of the best ways to keep them away is to mow more often. Less grass means less deer. It was rough throwing the ball to Maple today as she was in “keep away” mode. Even Batman played “hard to get”. I set a rat trap for our little friend that I hear running about the walls near the chicken coop.
In Lithuania: The family took a quick 5-min Uber to the train station and caught the 9:25 am train to Kaunas.
My wife’s cousin Irma and her 7-year old daughter JogailÄ— picked them up and they drove to the Kaunas castle (see photo to the right). On the way there, she showed them the store where oak doors/floors made by her company are sold. She is their quality manager.
We parked by the castle and took a walk through Kaunas old town. Got some Boba 🧋 on the way. I was fast to pay for all, but Irma wanted to treat them. My wife mentioned to Katie that Lithuanians do fight on who picks up the bill.
Their next stop was the Tadas Ivanauskas Museum of Zoology. It was founded on 15th of July in 1919 and is one of the oldest museums in Lithuania and the Baltic countries. The founder of the museum was a famous Lithuanian naturalist Prof. Tadas Ivanauskas. After a century of existence, the museum’s zoology collection consists of about 300,000 animal preparations.
They also visited the school where her father got his engineering degree, kind of the MIT of Lithuania. Next they walked to the War Museum where Bobby had a blast! Irma walked back to the castle and brought the car.
The War Museum hosts the remains of Lituanica, an airplane flown from New York across the Atlantic Ocean by Lithuanian pilots Steponas Darius and Stasys GirÄ—nas in 1933. After successfully flying 6,411Â km (4,043 miles), it crashed, due to undetermined circumstances, 650Â km (404 miles) from its destination,
Kaunas. Kristina spent 6 years investigating their flight, published a book with her findings, defended a dissertation on that topic and got a ton of highest government awards for that. My wife plans to read that book soon.
Irma now lives 30 minutes from Kaunas in the historic town of Vilkija, first mentioned in chronicles in 1364! There was a mass grave of Lithuanian partisans killed by soviets in Irma’s backyard. Eventually the bodies were exhumed and buried, there’s only a monument there now. When Irma’s husband Juozas was rebuilding the garage, he found a gun in great shape that belonged to partisans.
Interesting note: Louis Armstrong was raised by a Jewish family in New Orleans. Apparently they were emigrants from Vilkija! Louis was raised with the nostalgic stories in Yiddish about this beautiful town and villages surrounding it. Even though the boy and his birth-parents were born and raised Americans, but his second home, people who took care of him, were Karnovsky’s family from Vilkija. There’s a park in his name in Vilkija now.
They also stopped at The Juškos Museum of Ethnic Culture in Vilkija.
At Irma’s house they enjoyed a meal of kebabs and fish caught by the guys a day ago. Also, a few taxidermy pieces that they own after finding them dead.
After lunch, Irma drove the family to see her aunt and uncle, and they saw many storks (about 20) and their nests on the way! Lithuania is believed to have one of the largest white stork populations in the European Union, with about 20,000 nesting pairs.
They made a quick stop to my wife’s grandparents’ grave. The kids were to tired to get out, so Irma and her went alone. While at my wife’s aunt’s place they took a quick detour to their old house where she spent many wonderful summers!
By 9:20 pm they were back at the Kaunas train station ready to go back to Vilnius. They arrived back in Vilnius at 10:31 pm and called an Uber to take them home.