The route so far

OK. So the following posts are just going to be all over the place. That's how it is. Don't cry.

But so as to give you some illusion of continuity, this is how we have got ourselves to Daugavpils by a long and convoluted route. Here is a visual aid for your benefit:

Purple is for planes. Yellow is for boats. Green is for trains and buses. The giant red arrow indicates where we are now. Daugavpils. Because I know you really, really care.

So it was from Paris to Stockholm, Stockholm to Turku back to Stockholm, to Oslo, to Bergen, to Tornio (via Olso, Trondheim, Fauske, Narvik and Lulea), to Lapland, to Jyväskylä, to Vaasa (also known as Vasa), to Porto (via London) to Lisbon, to Sobreira Formosa, to Lisbon, to Lagos, to Sevilla, to Madrid, to Milan, to Venice, to Dubrovnik, to Sarajevo, to Vilnius (via Budapest and Warsaw) and then to Daugavpils.

Daugavpils is nice because it doesn't move. And the Russian hair.

Particularly harrowing, perhaps because it is still a raw scar on my soul, was the three consecutive nights spent on Soviet trains and buses getting from Sarajevo to Vilnius. Naturally checked and searched by border guards and other demanding Eastern Europeans at random points during the night (usually when we were just about to fall into what was a permanently elusive sleep). Technically it was only 2 and a half nights, because we were kindly dumped in the middle of an abandoned Vilnius bus depot at 3:15 in the morning. With our 45kgs of luggage, nowhere to stay, no idea of where we were and a total ignorance of what currency they use in Lithuania, let alone ownership of any said currency.

But clearly I survived in tact enough to spend 20 minutes drawing arrows and lines on the 1996 version of Microsoft Paint. That is my contribution to humanity.