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Everlasting Autumn

Our bike trip throughout the past countries (Finland, Estona, Latvia and Lithuania) has been a gorgeous range of fall colours. The types of trees have slowly changed form country to country and the colours have gotten prettier and prettier. It is often hard to capture the brilliant colours that nature is capable of creating. The picture above was taken yesterday afternoon as we came into a town called Biržai. We stayed at a nice little camp site there. So far the people throughout the Baltics have been extremely kind and welcoming. Although there is often a language barrier, we are generally able to get by with a few commonly known words and a bit of motion/sign language. Earlier today we were thinking about staying at this hostel but the couple that owned it didn't speak a word of English. They ended up calling a friend that spoke a little English and we used her through the phone to communicate. Even though it ended up not working out it was a cool experience. He spoke a little German but that didn't do much as none of us speak German. We have a few different languages we can communicate in but English and Norwegian have been the only two used so far. Markos, Dad and I speak French, Mom and Dad speak Spanish and my Dad also knows how to speak Norwegain and a bit of Danish. It has been fun to travel through all these different countries and learn how to say thank you in all the different languages. So far it's been "Takk" - Norwegian, "Tack" - Swedish, "Kiitos" - Finnish, "Spasibo" - Russian, "Aitäh" - Estonian, "Paldies" - Latviand and "Ačiū" - Lithuanian. Sometimes just saying thank you in their language can mean a lot to them and it always results in a smile. : ) My friend Loren Maddison who actually accompanied us for a bit of our North America trip in 2008-2009 recently wrote to me and suggested that I added a bit more of a personal touch. Some interesting things that happened today included Mom accidentally buying ketchup instead of tomato sauce for chile, the chile ended up not too bad but a good lesson learned about checking the packaging of things we buy in the grocery stores. We saw a cool snake this morning that was frozen up on the side of the road. Unfortunately the past few weeks have been quite rainy, wet, cold and we have had a lot of head wind. Hopefully this weather doesn't last much longer! We ended up at a nice flat in a town called Dembava tonight. It's amazing how useful technology is while we are travelling. Around 5pm today, Dad looked online for apartments for rent for a night or hotels around the town we were gonna be in. He found this apartment and reserved it for the night. Two hours later we showed up to a warm apartment and we're inside of the evening. I am extremely appreciative when we stay inside, especially when it is cold and wet outside. Anyways, it is getting quite late and I should probably get some sleep tonight. We biked about 75km today and I am continuing to work through my school online when I can. I've posted some more pictures of Lithuania on the photography page. Enjoy!


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