Summertime is the time when our family travel the most – many short weekend trips fill at least half of our holidays. Especially in those summers when we don’t go on any longer and further travel like the last summer. That might be a reason why I didn’t have time to write about this trip already last summer (as well as the fact that our kido has almost no interest in cartoons during summer and I don’t want to remind about them by sitting by the computer), however spring is the best time for articles like this and I hope it will inspire you for your own weekend trips! This time – Lithuania! Taurage – Rusne (Silute district) – Klaipeda.
We had heard about Taurage many times, mostly about its used cars markets, and we wanted to go take a look at once – is the offer really that big and cheap as they say. Unfortunately Taurage is never by-the-way when driving from Latvia, so we decided to have a trip over Lithuania’s Western part…
Taurage is quite small city with narrow, but neat center – enough to linger for few hours.
After visiting Taurage we went to Silute districy where close to little town named Rusne we had booked very nice and beautiful hotel on a river Nemuna shore. Drive to Villa Rusne is beautiful, road goes through little river-port towns and it seems that there is a boat in every yard… Only our hotel is hard to find. Ironically, administration said – everyone says it is! But seems this isn’t reason enough to add some extra road sign. But I have to admit, this is the only minus for the hotel! We can completely agree with booking.com rating 9.8 and we would love to stay here some other time, only in hotter summer and for more days to enjoy boat tours, sunbathing and water fun!
Sadly this time we stayed in Villa Rusne just 1 night. In the morning after breakfast we went (by car) to view platform near by and continue our trip throught the romantic maritime Silute district towns. Next stop is Klaipeda Zoo, which was widely advertised in 2016 with newlyborn white tiger babies…
When I think about Klaipeda MiniZoo, I have to tell you this – there is very wide collection of animals (I could hardly name it MiniZoo) and you can see them really close. Most peaceful animals walk freely. But it is obvious, they are overfed (likely to be peaceful), because there are food leftovers in many cages – mouse corpses for owls, meat pieces for tigers, watermelons for monkeys.
Wolf cages are covered with large puddles, almost in the size of cages, so wolfs are hiding in few dry places and on sheds’ roofs. Bear lives in a small cage without a shelter to hide from sun, only refreshment option is a bathtube. As interesting it is to see big animals so close, it also is sad to see the conditions they live in. But reindeers, lamas and roes lives freely as well as waterbirds.
I mentioned white tiger babies. They live in special glass cage and people can go play with them for seperate charge. Well we don’t do that because, first, we don’t want to wait in such a big row, second, we don’t have that much cash with us and, third, seeing how many people play with tiger babies all day long, it doesn’t seem they would need us crumpling them.
If I shall say in one sentence… If you are tempted to put your objective near lions’ nose, you will like this place, but if you are more of a animal defender, then don’t damage your nerves.
This time after Klaipeda we went straight back to Latvia (we had a concert to attend), but if not, we would definitely stopped for dinner at HBH “Juozo” beer brewery and restaurant in Palanga, which has not only very tasteful food, but also large and nice territory with playgrounds and small natural Zoo. By the way, don’t forget to taste crispy bread battonets snack with garlic and cheese!
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