Greetings from the West Coast of Lithuania
Tuesday, July 29th, 2008By WebAdmin
Pastor Bob Jones, from the Grand Canyon Synod, is our Missionary to Lithuania. He has just embarked on a fund-raising bike-a-thon across Eastern Europe to raise money for the Lithuanian Lutheran church. We are posting email updates from his trip in this Grace Notes blog.
Dear Friends and Members of the International Church of Vilnius
Yes, I am now in Klaipeda — about 300 kilometers west of Vilnius and boy have I had the adventures! It was a tough call whether to go north or south of the big highway. South would have meant Trakai, which I have visited many times before, north meant seeing Kernave, another UNESCO World Heritage Site, which is where I went. Everything went fine until I got about 7 kilometers west of there. I missed a turn and wound up on about 5 kilometers of truly terrible construction. I made ti through and realized that I had missed a turn. There was no easy way–no paved way back to where I needed to be, so I followed the advice of a Russian Lithuanian who suggested that I take a relatively smooth gravel/dirt road to Jonava, about 20 kilometers north of where I had hoped to get for the evening.
The road from Jonava to Kaunas is actually a freeway–not my preference, but I needed to get back to Kaunas (mainly because I know a few places to stay therel). I got into Kaunas at about 5:30 PM on Saturday, July 26–and decided to stay at the Litinterp, a nice little hotel chain that I knew from staying at the one here Klaipeda. It’s a 2 star hotel with nicely remodeled, clean rooms, though they tend to be in poorer neighborhoods right next to the center of town. Unfortunately, as a 2 star hotel, the staff is not present 24 hours a day, so I had to wait until 8:00 PM for the staff person to arrive. The room was only 120 litas or just over $50.00 USD. If I could find nice places that cheap, I would probably toss my tent and sleeping bag!
Anyway, I while I was waiting for the desk person, I sat for a while on the Promenade about two blocks away, and I ran into an older man who claimed to be “the Lithuanian Tarzan”. He had photos from an old movie version of Tarzan which was who he claimed to be. It was an interesting way to pass the time. The ride into Kaunas with the unexpected detour came to about 89 miles–about 29 miles more than I had intended to ride in a typical day.
Texts for this week:
The 
Race horses have blinders to keep them focused on the track, looking only straight ahead. But blinders obviously have a major drawback, for one can not see what is happening all around them.