We're back on the farm after our summer trip from Finland through the Baltics and Belarus, the Alps and Munich. Everything here is, agreeably, as we left it.
Everywhere along our route except Murren, in the Swiss Alps, was unusually hot. In Finland they grumbled, but we enjoyed swimming in the lake - actually warm for once. Vilnius, Lithuania, in particular, baked in the sun. We were persuaded, as we sat under umbrellas at a terrace café there, to take a bus to Minsk rather than the train.
The train was old and Belarusian and stopped forever at the border, they said. It would take the better part of five hours, while the nice modern bus took something over three.
They were quite right about the length of the trip. Thing was, the air conditioning on the nice modern bus barely made it the 33 kilometers to the Lithuania/Belarus border. And naturally, the windows were structurally shut. Hot in there.
Builds character. Makes a good story.
Tons of photos are coming. For today's Wednesday HDR, here's one I like from Vilnius, Lithuania. It's old town was packed with tourists like us on the afternoon we hit town, so I decided to get up early the next morning and do the same walk before the tourists. This photo looks up an alley around the corner from the Presidency building. It's a single shot re-exposed at +2 & -2, combined and tone-mapped in Photomaix, tweaked with Nik Software.
EarthPhotos.com will have new Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Belarus Galleries soon. For now, here are some low-res photos from all the countries we visited on our August trip.
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