Man,  this has taken me awhile.  I figured rather than just uploading some photos, I would do them all, which is clearly a bad idea, but that’s kind of my forte. On Saturday I left on a trip to the Northeast part of the country.  We went to an old oil shale mine that has been converted into an oil shale museum, so that was nice.  Then we went to a place called Rakvere, which has a castle.  The Rakvere Castle was super weird.  When we got there, it seemed normal enough for an old castle, until we realized that in the castle courtyard there was some kind of karaoke contest.  The current song was..  I’m not sure what it’s called, and I’m not going to look it up, but suffice to say that the singer was there to remind you of the mess you left when you went away.  We toured the castle, which tour was light on history and heavy on showing us old swords and old guns and the old torture room.  Still, it was cool and there were nice views.

Things got a bit weirder when we left the inside of the castle, and instead of a karaoke contest, there was the first of maybe six belly-dancing performances.  I got one picture.  It was odd.  There were some cool goats there though, so I got some good pictures of the goats. Afterwards we went to a little cottage place in a small town and went swimming in the Baltic.  Not as cold as Northern California, not nearly as cold as Norway, but still a little more cold than what I hope the ocean in heaven to be like.

Sunday morning we went to some old manor houses that were owned by Baltic Germans.  There were nice and well-maintained, but for the most part they were old houses, you know?  Anyhow, after that we went to the first National Forest in the Soviet Union.  It was pretty, and I got some good pics.  Hooray!  So here are a ton of pics.  I’ll do a separate post with videos in a second.