Just a week and we have galloped through the Baltics - conscious that we have many miles to travel if we're going to get south. With 3 very different countries to go through we don't really feel that we've done them justice - but it's been mind-widening and welcoming. We loved Tallinn - a regenerated railway area where galleries, microbreweries, studios, and cafes mingled with Saturday sunshine chatter and music and where Nala could join us to in a photographic gallery to see an incredible exhibition 'Meeting Sophie' - photographs of a young woman in a small village in Eastern Germany. And then through the city walls into a compact old town - familiar Hanseatic influences, cobbles and steep roofs and a town square where we could have a cold beer. Estonia felt wealthy and with a high level of recent development. The wild camping was great - with many managed spots with shelters, fireplaces, and compost loos. At one we had a chat with a self-confessed Viking, happy to go to Valhalla. Interesting to hear of his experience delivering aid to Ukraine - a dislike of Russia which pointed to some tensions between Estonians and the settled Russians. We explored the folk history of Estonia at an open-air museum - with brilliantly curated collections creating 'lived in' rural homes of the last 200 years, folk dancing and bringing it more up to date with a collective farm workers' building showing 4 apartments from 1960s, 70s, 90s and 2000s - like walking into real homes. The landscape as we drove south was unchanging - long, straight, very good roads with open fields either side, some planted with grains, the odd house or new development. It's different to be back in mixed woodland - familiar oaks, beech and willows. We paused at Parnu - a seaside resort from the early 1900s, still waking from the winter, with beautiful old wooden villas alongside art nouveau houses and brand new, architecturally designed homes. And we had a useful rest day - collecting ourselves, doing a wash and me doing a bit of work prep. We rather fell for Estonia and felt sad to cross the border - now just a widened bit of road with rusting metal checkpoints. In Latvia we enjoyed the coast road - sandy pines with the undeveloped Baltic beach constantly to our right. We wild camped on the edge of it and saw the sunset over the horizon en route to Riga. A much bigger city than Tallinn, I think it suffered from us having 'old town fatigue' and a bit of a mid-point low. That said, its old town was impressive (though much of it rebuilt after the war) and across parks that reminded me of St James's Park, there is an art nouveau area of streets of strikingly decorated buildings. The Museum of Soviet Occupation was sobering - with a mission to Remember. Commemorate. Remind. And on … into Lithuania. A lovely encounter in a little shop that looked like it had not changed much since the Soviet era and our first real time of speaking none of each other's language but still managing to communicate - and a night in a small, orchard campsite which serves pilgrims on the Camino Lithuanian, decorated with the blue and yellow shells so familiar to Clare from Spain. The lovely couple who ran it chatted for a while - of concerns that people from the UK and western Europe think it's unsafe to travel, as they've seen their numbers fall; that they can no longer visit or be visited by close friends in Russia, and as he described the history of the pilgrim's dormitory (a post office in pre-WW1 Russian days and a house for Nazi officers in WW2) a final shrug and "we shall see" with a sense that it could be possible they could one day be under Russian control again. We visited the Hill of Crosses - an extraordinary 'golgotha' of wooden crosses, a site of pilgrimage and peaceful protest; the small, vibrant old town of Kaunas; and Grutas Park - a 'graveyard' for Soviet statues which trod a strange line between a reminder of the brutality of the occupation and an almost nostalgic exhibition of the powerful statues and propaganda of the era and with the distraction of a huge children's playground and animal zoo - including a pacing small brown bear ☹. One final night under trees by a lake on the Belarus border, and along a forest track we've passed into Poland. We've found these countries thought provoking and a little unsettling overall. Their history is so full of turmoil and what they have been through in the last 100 years is almost too much to comprehend. Even walking in the now familiar forests does not hold the same tranquillity when close by there is a holocaust memorial to executed Jewish villagers. Not just occupation - but the repression of their identity and way of life - collectivisation, removal of religion, traditions, folk music and dance, language. We look at the land and the people with an admiration for their fight and survival. And yet it's made us wonder whether we should meet these countries at where they are at now - not with the burden of history. It does put what is going on in Ukraine in a different light too. Lance felt that being in Riga made it easier to imagine being in Kyiv with drone attacks overhead. If Russia wins the war in Ukraine - what next? Would these countries be catapulted back to occupation just 30 years after they have achieved independence and with all the national pride and economic development of their recent past. Their solidarity with Ukraine is shown in the blue / yellow flag flown alongside the national flag in all official places - quite moving.