Sarah Palin is often misquoted as saying I can see Russia from my house! – thank you, Tina Fey – but I can say I saw Russia from my rental car!
While visiting Lithuania to speak at a tech conference, I drove to Panemunė which is on the Nemunas River (apparently also known as Neman) which separates Lithuania from the Kalingrad enclave. Panemunė is a two hour drive from Kaunus, Lithuania’s second city. The likelihood of me traveling to Russia is fairly non-existent, with the current Ukraine/Russia war and my wife’s threats of divorce in mind, but that doesn’t mean I can’t get close!
I’m not sure what I expected to see. Perhaps a mile from the river there’s a fortified customs post that lorries have their their contents and documentation examined before driving on a dedicated, secure path that apparently leads them to a bridge that crosses the river into Russia. The war appears to have stopped that as no lorries were anywhere to be seen.
The public enters or leaves Russia via the Queen Louse Bridge after passing through a secured zone, above. The bridge has been closed to car traffic since April 2022, but on average 200 people walk across per day. This would explain the bored taxi drivers waiting nearby, presumably hoping that someone crosses on foot and needs to be driven somewhere. However, I saw no one on a Monday morning at 11am. In fact, I saw almost no one at all.
A nearby berm would have given a view of the river, the bridge, and Sovetsk, Russia, but as I don’t know if that’s allowed or whether there are standing shoot-to-kill orders, I decided to stay away.
[Prior to Germany WWII, Sovetsk was Tilsit, Prussia. It is over 480 miles/785km from the German capital Berlin, amazingly a distance longer than Berlin to Brussels. Wow.]
And with that, I returned to my car and started my drive to Vilnius.
