On Monday night, as we packed up to leave Vilnius the next morning, we gradually realised that we had got a day out in our schedule and were in fact supposed to be in Kaunas. Earlier in the trip this of course wouldn't have mattered, as we constantly made changes to the plan and revelled in being semi-spontaneous. Now however, we have so little time left that we have to be ruthless. Kaunas had to go. We'll have to save the only Devil Museum in Europe for another time. So we went straight on to Nida where we had three nights booked in a terribly respectable sounding guesthouse. Nida is a little fishing village on the Curonian Spit, a load of sand dunes and pine forests which protrudes from Kaliningrad (a random little bit of Russia in between Poland and Lithuania), but most of it actually runs parallel to Lithuania, just a few hundred metres away across the Curonian lagoon. So Russia and Lithuania have split it and Nida is right at the end of the Lithuanian bit - the closest to Russia we technically get on the trip!
We bussed to Klaipeda, a gritty and unattractive industrial port, and took a ferry across the lagoon to the Spit. I was expecting a hearty sea voyage of, say, about an hour or so, but in reality we were on the boat about five minutes before we had reached the other side. You could practically swim it - in fact, I bet people do in warmer weather. From the landing place at a village called Smiltyne we took a rattling little bus along the Spit to Nida, about an hour away.
The Spit is very beautiful: lots of colourful wooden houses set among pine forests leading right down to the sea, which is smooth and languid on the lagoon side and crashing and wild on the Baltic side. You can cross from one side of the Spit to the other very quickly: it's only around 4km and in some places you can almost see the sea on both sides of you through the woods. What Nida is particularly famous for is its sand dunes, which are indeed stunning: they make you feel as if you are in the Sahara...only slightly colder and wetter.
Having had beautiful sunny weather for well over a month, I had predicted that it would rain when we finally got to a beach. And such proved to be the case. Our first day in Nida it poured down from beginning to end with a nice cold wind into the bargain. In true British spirit, we refused to be deterred from our seaside holiday and wrapped up in cagoules and boots to go for a walk on the beach. The Lithuanian cleaner in the guesthouse wished us good luck in sepulchral tones, doubtless wondering what 
kind of lunatics she had staying in her house. We however thoroughly enjoyed our....bracing...walk along the sea front and even made it up to the top of the dunes for a quick look over to Russia before deciding that Honour, that demanding female, was satisfied and we could now retreat to the one cafe open in Nida for hot chocolate (Nida is pretty dead at this time of year - apparently it livens up in July and August). We later wondered whether we had accidentally stumbled into Russia, as it's not very clear which country the sand dunes actually belong to, but were assured that we couldn't have done, as we'd have been beset by large angry Russian men with large angry dogs not to speak of lots of barbed wire. Shame, it would have made a good story, but at least it's an excuse for another trip.....
Our second day in Nida was much improved: plenty of sunshine and a clear sky, so we rented bikes and cycled along the Spit through the well marked cycle path which goes alternately right along the sea front and through forests. On the way back, we turned off the main path to explore the less trodden paths of the woods and made
our way through gorgeous swathes of dappled sunshine to the other side of the Spit where we fulfilled a longheld ambition of the trip by paddling in the Baltic. It was too cold to swim, even for Brits, but we loved the beach: great expanses of golden sand almost totally empty, and somewhere over the water in the distance, England.
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