Today has been my laziest of many lazy days on this trip. In part due to my overindulgence last night and the rest due to some inclement weather.

Last night we waited in anticipation for the climax of Latvia’s longest day celebrations. All around us people fired up barbecues in much the same way that the same people fired up their barbecues the night before – nothing remarkable in that. More interestingly a few Latvians gathered armfuls of leaves and flowers: making the leaves into wreaths to be worn by men on their heads and the flowers into posies for the women.

My Braintree living Latvian chum demonstrates traditional Latvian headgear

As the evening drew on we were blessed with glorious warm sunshine. The campsite lit it’s not very impressive fire and the live act started on the improvised stage. This consisted of an accordionist playing waltz melodies as elderly couples from the nearby village waltzed. This maybe traditional but it wasn’t the height of excitement for curious observers.

Finally desperate for some action we joined up with a German couple we had spoken to earlier in the day and at 11pm set off to the local village where we were promised, by the campsite owner the climax of the event with people “dancing and drinking until 4am”.

When we arrived in the village a small fire had been lit. The fires were, for me, the most interesting aspect of the evening. They were made in a way I have not seen before. Long logs assembled into a cone shape about 5 feet high and somehow lit from the inside, so they gave off plenty of heat but not much flame. My guess is that this is a technique used by people who live in a forested land to prevent the fire spreading and very different from the British technique of piling wood onto a fire in a fairly haphazard fashion resulting, in the early stages of a fire, in flames leaping many feet in the air.

The climax we had been promised was a mediocre country and western band knocking out Latvian equivalents of “stand by your man” as more elderly couples jigged on the dance floor. After two hours and too many beers, we retired to Basil at about 1am.

Maybe there used to be an exciting traditional festival in Latvia on the longest day, but like the world over these traditions are being lost and replaced by homogenised events that don’t really reflect the old local customs. Or it could just be that we were unlucky in this particular village and elsewhere in Latvia people were dressed in traditional clothes and dancing to local folk tunes.

Due to a slight overindulgence in the beer department I had the latest start of the trip. I was not out of bed until midday!!! I had just about managed a cup of coffee when the lovely weather finally broke and it started to rain. I spent the afternoon planning places of interest and potential campsites in Finland and we now have a rough route, up the Eastern side of Finland, mapped out.

Finally the requirement to get the dogs wormed before entering Finland had become urgent. The public holiday meant that no vets answered their phones yesterday and as I started ringing round this morning I feared the worst, when the first few didn’t pick up. Finally I found a 24 hour vet in Tallinn who not only answered the phone, but spoke excellent English and told us to just turn up on Monday morning and they would sort it out. We were relieved, because potentially it could have meant rebooking the ferry which was not cheap to start with.

*Sarah insists I point out that despite my laziness she has managed 14,000 steps today and does not want to be tarred with my lazy brush.