Riding out of Riga

On the first day of our road trip out of Riga, j and I went to an ethnographic park.  These parks are dotted all over Europe, especially eastern Europe but I'd never been to one.  They basically take all the super historic but basically peasanty buildings from all over and all different time periods and restore them/ stick them together into this living museum.  I'd never been to one, in Europe anyway, so I voted to go to the outskirts of Riga where they had one. 

It was one of those moments of our profound luck magic again, in that we happened to go on the same day as the historical society of Latvia decided to have their pan cosplay party.  So the place was swarming with people in traditional dress doing dancing demonstrations and musical performances, selling traditional crafts, pottery and blacksmithing stuff. 

So we wandered through all the cool buildings, there was some awesome stuff like they had a construction of the granary/ hay barn where it was on a hill so you could basically load a two story building from the top. 

Also some really outfitted cottages with flower and vegetable gardens. 

But the highlight besides the people was really the mills.  They had three mills and one of them you could go all the way up it.  The heavy pine timbers and the great crushing wheels of its insides.  And when you climbed you could then look out at the forests and farmlands all around.