Multi-day Baltic tours.

Art Nouveau by day, pine-forest beach by afternoon. Riga and its belle-époque seaside suburb in three days.

The Hanseatic merchant city, told from the wall inward. Guild halls, almshouses and the marzipan kitchen.

A UNESCO sand-dune peninsula, fishing villages, and amber on the morning tide. Four days at the pace of the wind.

Mark Rothko's birthplace, the Latgale lakes, Aglona Basilica and the Versailles of the north. Five days across the eastern half of Latvia.

A UNESCO smoke sauna ceremony at Mooska, the Kingdom of Setomaa, and the Old Believers' onion villages on Lake Peipus. Five days across Estonia's deep south.

Eight days down the dunes and the delta under your own power. We book the beds, move the bags and draw the route; you ride it at whatever pace the morning suggests.

Vilnius, Riga and Tallinn on scheduled trains and coaches, with the seats booked and the luggage moved. Three UNESCO old towns and nothing to park.

Ninety-six kilometres of waymarked coast from the wooden villas of Jūrmala to Cape Kolka, where two seas visibly collide. Day packs only; the bags go ahead.

Vilnius to Tallinn with your own keys. The car, the hotels, the ferry slots and a route book that knows which turn you will miss.

Baroque Vilnius, modernist Kaunas, a hill of a hundred thousand crosses and a sand spit in the sea. The whole country in a week, with the car only for the middle of it.

Out of Riga and back to it: the Gauja valley, Cape Kolka where two seas meet, a Soviet naval port, and Rundāle before the coaches arrive.

Hiiumaa, Saaremaa and Muhu with every ferry slot booked. The emptiest roads in the Baltics and a manor house at the end of them.

Gdańsk, the largest brick castle on earth, two thousand lakes and a capital rebuilt from paintings. The half of Poland the Kraków trips never reach.

More than half the country is forest, it holds the densest wolf population in the EU, and it sits on one of Europe's great migration corridors. A week at the pace of an actual naturalist.

Three festive capitals in one week: the Cathedral Square tree in Vilnius, the Riga market where the first Christmas tree is said to have stood, and Tallinn's medieval Town Hall Square, with mulled wine at every stop.

The tall city tree below your hotel windows, a day trip to Trakai's island castle over an ice-rimmed lake, and Kaunas, Lithuania's own second capital with its own Christmas market.

The market where the first Christmas tree is said to have stood, a real ride on Sigulda's public bobsled track, and a quieter second market in Cēsis: five private days in one festive capital.

Tallinn's Town Hall Square Christmas market, regularly voted the finest in Europe, plus a day in Tartu, Estonia's university town, and a winter bog walk with a traditional smoke sauna.

Six days around Rovaniemi, the official home of Santa Claus: the Arctic Circle on foot, a husky team of your own, a working reindeer farm with Sámi hosts, a snowmobile safari, and a night under the glass roof of an aurora igloo.

Three Polish cities in the cold months: Warsaw under lights, Kraków's Main Square market beneath St Mary's, and Wrocław, where winter is at its most theatrical.

The solstice, kept the old way: white nights in the countryside, a wreath-weaving day, and Jāņi eve in a Latvian manor village, with Līgo songs and a bonfire held until the 4:30 sunrise.