Aloha from Vilnius!

As you know, I am taking care of a friend’s eleven-year-old daughter this weekend.  Sunday’s activity — an afternoon at the Vichy Water Park in Vilnius. Despite that fact that the entrance signs say “Aloha!”, the park is supposed to evoke a Polynesian island.  The plastic palm trees and murals of sea animals did not transport me to a tropical paradise, but it was wonderfully warm inside.  We had a lot of fun playing in the water for three hours — swimming in the wave pool, floating in the river, soaking in the hot tub.  I’ll admit that we were wimps and only rode the easy water slides.  But the kid did get brave enough to go down the slides her own inner tub after first only wanting to go with me in the double inner tube.  On this last day of October, facing forecasts of a particularly cold winter, it was so nice to swim and pretend for a few hours that we had escaped northeastern Europe.