Lee and I arranged for a wakeup call for 7:30 a.m. so we could join Denise and Bruce for breakfast in the main dining room. It was a beautiful day, with a clear sky and just a bit of chop on the water.

    
  

It was down to the Grand Restaurant for an open-seating breakfast at 8:30. I ordered eggs benedict and it was an omelet for Lee. Along with Denise and Bruce, we were seated with Marty and Minky, a retired couple from Florida formerly from Kentucky formerly from Ork (get it? Ork … Marty & Minky, Mork & Mindy?). Also joining us at our table was a lovely couple from Tokyo.

Our Japanese tablemates command of the English language was very limited, so Marty took the lead. Through the course of the meal Marty talked and Minky talked and Marty managed to determine that our new Tokyoite friend was an executive with Nissan. However, he didn't own a Nissan. His wife preferred Jaguar so that's what they had in the garage.

With breakfast done, Lee and I disembarked at 10:20 and met Laverne and Bert on the pier. Customs was not a problem as there was none. From there, the four of us struck off towards old town. After a kilometer or so, we wandered into what we thought was the main market, which turned out to be for locals. Not much there for us tourist types so off we went looking for the tourist stuff.

    
  

After a couple of wrong turns and some misdirected map reading we finally got on track and headed toward the Dane Canal, which is where we should have been going in the first place. Arriving at Theatre Square, we found the vendor stalls where there was lots of amber displayed. Amber is what Klaipeda is known for and we found the mother lode.

  

Baltic amber was formed between 40 and 55 million years ago in the pine forests that were part of the Scandinavian land mass which was later swallowed up by the Baltic Sea. Freshly excreted resin from a tree filled crevices in the trunk and trapped insects which were gradually covered by new excretions. Eventually these trapped insects became fossilized. Most deposits of Baltic amber are found on the Baltic Sea's southern coast, having been washed there from their original location. The amber is either gathered from the shore, scooped up from the sea floor with nets attached to long poles or dredged mechanically.

We did some browsing from stall to stall and just generally admired the square. Also in the square and in front of the theatre is Anna's Fountain, a replica of a famous prewar monument to the German poet Simon Dach (1605-1659), which depicts the heroine of his folksong Ännchen von Tharau. It was about Anna Neander, born in 1619 to a village minister in Tharau. Dach was apparently smitten with her beauty and wrote the 17-verse poem as a wedding present to her.

    

From there it was a short walk over to the canal where we stopped by the Memelis Restaurant for a litre or two of beer. On the recommendation of our waitress, Lee and I ordered black beer, which was surprisingly sweet and quite tasty.

    
  

After our beer stop, we wandered on down the canal towards the Meridianas, a permanently moored wooden 3-masted sailing vessel, which was built by the Finns for their naval navigation school in 1948. Restored, the ship is now owned by a lawyer who turned it into a restaurant. You can't miss it with its yellow sails advertising the local Svyturys beer company.

    

In the adjacent square, there was a small crafts fair with more amber for sale and a lot of carved, chiseled and lathe-turned wood products being offered. After Laverne had negotiated a hot deal on a warm blanket festooned with moose, we continued on our way.

Our destination was Jonas Hill, a fragment of Klaipeda's fortification system. The fort consisted of a low hill surrounded by a narrow moat. If this was the best the Klaipedaites could do for protection in days gone by, it wasn't hard to see why they were successfully invaded so many times in the past.

  

We then walked back towards Old Town through a couple of streets whose buildings are in the process of being restored. Along our way we found a small square with a sculpture entitled "Sights of the City". What it consisted of was a small brass building with dragon figures on top. After a short photo stop, we continued on.

Arriving back in the Theatre Square and its market I made my best purchase of the cruise, an intricately hand-carved walking stick encrusted with pieces of amber. It was so unique it invited lots of envious comments from people we passed throughout the rest of the trip. We purchased a couple of other pieces of amber as well. Then it was time to make our way back to the ship.

Again, we had done a lot of walking by the time we reboarded the Century so it was time for a little R&R. Had a bit of lunch with Laverne and Bert then it was up to our cabin for a snooze before our scheduled departure at six o'clock. Woke up just before six and watched our departure from our veranda.

      

As the ship cleared the seaport channel, we had a great view of the K&D Towers to starboard and the Curonian Spit off our port side. The K & D Towers are new 70 metre (228 ft) tall skyscrapers which were completed in 2006. Dominating Klaipeda's skyline the 20 storey buildings represent the letters K and D and house both offices and apartments. The K building includes a cafe with an observation deck.

The Curonian Spit is a long narrow strip of sand dunes 97 kilometers long separating most of the Baltic shoreline from the open sea and creating a body of water known as the Curonian Lagoon. The Spit is on the UNESCO Heritage list due to its unique bird nesting sites and the "Great Dune" which stands 52 metres (169 ft) in height.

    

Our departure was quite uneventful even though the wind was up and the sea had a high chop. Watching the pilot boats plunging up and down in our wake gave us a pretty good idea of how rough the sea really was once we cleared the breakwater.

  

Again, we met our cruise buddies for a casual dinner in the dining room, then it was down to the theatre for an hour of Nick Lewin, a very funny magician and comedian. After the show was done, we went back to our stateroom and it was off to bed at 1 a.m.