🇱🇻 Bernāti, Liepāja & Jurkalne
We decided it was time to say goodbye to Lithuania and hello to Latvia! First order of business: laundry. Yes, very exciting, but that’s part of van life, too. Longing for a relaxing day, we picked the closest promising-looking campsite with beach access and a washing machine.
It was family-run, and we were welcomed warmly. Although there were some language barriers, we had a great chat with our very first Latvian local.
Excited about the washing machine, we immediately put it to work and hung the laundry out in the sun.
We then went for a walk on the beach and enjoyed yet another perfect sunset. To our surprise, someone had put up a swing under the branch of a tree on a dune, allowing us to swing into the sunset.
What a beautiful day!
… until we returned and realised our mistake: the sun had virtually no power left, and our laundry was just as wet as when we had hung it up.
The nearby city of Liepāja had a launderette, so we accepted our fate, collected the wet clothes and ended up spending a good part of the next day outside the launderette.
Once the laundry business was done, we used the rest of the day to explore Liepāja. Locals like to call it “the city where the wind is born”, a nickname that nods to the constant sea breeze as much as to the city’s creative, independent spirit.
Apparently, it also has a military harbour, as there were military ships, people in uniform and cordoned-off areas right by the canal near the harbour entrance. Naval history runs deep here: a little further north lies Karosta, a former naval base that Tsar Alexander III had built from 1890 onwards. In Soviet times it was a closed military town, off-limits even to the people of Liepāja themselves. Today it covers about a third of the city, and its name comes from “kara osta”, Latvian for “war port”. You can even tour the old military prison there or spend a night in it. Not quite our idea of a relaxing day, though.
To be fair, the city didn’t excite us all that much, which is a bit unfair, considering that Liepāja is also considered the birthplace of Latvian rock music and will be a European Capital of Culture in 2027. So we ended up in a great café, where we finished off the visit with coffee and cake. Yum!
It was a bit of a forced stop (thanks to the laundry), after all…
The day had started very well: the laundry had gone perfectly, we’d had a great breakfast, found a lovely café and explored a new city.
All we had to do now was find a nice, quiet spot to sleep. We quickly spotted a lovely park-up just behind the dunes, with beach access. Perfect!
On arrival, we parked Wilma and wanted to head straight to the beach, but first, a quick sip of water. And that’s when the day took a turn for the worse. The water was brownish-yellow! We had filled the tank that morning and hadn’t noticed anything, but apparently the water contained a lot of iron. A quick search online confirmed that many taps in the Baltics serve up water with a huge amount of iron.
Well, what now? We couldn’t drink that, and we didn’t have any bottled water either.
After a very stressful 20 minutes, we had a plan: we would empty the entire tank, buy some bottled water at a nearby shop and move to a paid campsite about 20 minutes away that explicitly stated drinking water was available for filling up our tank.
The plan worked, and the crisis was averted. And we were rewarded, too! We were the only campers, and the campsite was amazing: little huts, with couches and chairs everywhere, private beach access via a somewhat dodgy-looking but perfectly safe homemade staircase, and a beautiful sunset.
What a day!