Lithuania self-drive

Airport transfer to a hotel inside the old town. No car yet, and you will not want one: Vilnius is walkable end to end. An orientation walk in the route book takes you through the university courtyards and up to Gediminas hill for the view.

Vilnius was called the Jerusalem of the North, and before 1941 about a third of the city was Jewish. The Great Synagogue is gone, the ghetto gates are marked in the pavement, and the route book tells you what stood where. It is a quiet, heavy hour and worth setting aside properly rather than walking past it on the way to lunch.

Kaunas was the temporary capital between the wars, when Vilnius was held by Poland, and a small country built itself a whole modernist city in twenty years. It became a UNESCO site in 2023 for exactly that. The route book marks a walking loop of the best of it, ending at the funicular, which still runs on its 1931 wooden carriages.

Nobody knows how many crosses are on the hill. The Soviet authorities bulldozed it three times between 1961 and 1975 and people put the crosses back each time, at night, which is the whole point of the place. The current estimate is somewhere past two hundred thousand, and you can hear them moving against each other in any wind.

Drive the car onto the ferry at Klaipėda and off again two minutes later on the Curonian Spit. Fifty kilometres south through pine forest, with stops at the Hill of Witches and the dead dunes at Nagliai. Nida by lunch.

A day without the car. Walk up the Parnidis dune to the granite sundial, visit Thomas Mann's summer house, then cross the spit on foot to the open Baltic beach, which is usually empty even in August.

Back up the spit and the ferry, then a stop in Palanga for the amber museum in the Tiškevičiai palace before you hand the car back. Fly out of Palanga (PLQ), ten minutes from the museum, or drive the four hours back to Vilnius.