Got back from our road trip. It was quite amazing, the whole #vanlyfe thing was a lot more fun than expected, and our ancient little van held up wonderfully.
We also visited the shelter wherer Kiira is from. To enter back into Finland she needed some stupid pill and a stamp from a vet that she ate the pill a maximum of 5 days before entering. So we contacted the organisation through which we got her, and they told us to drop by the shelter in Lithuania, they have their own vet, and they'd gladly help us out. It was pretty heartbreaking. First of all, Kiira was NOT happy seeing the place again. She first just wanted to run back into the car, then just froze up. After a short visit to the vet, we brought her back to the van and gave her a nice chew and left her a bit to get a tour of the place. Man, it's rough. They're the only no-kill shelter in the area, but are completely overloaded. They have about 300 dogs at the moment and while we were there 2 got brought in... The stench and noise is absolutely horrifying. They work their asses off with mostly volunteers and an extremely limited budget, and they really try to give these dogs a better life (which in a lot of cases isn't that hard, many of them were taken from yards where they were beaten and chained up), but it must be such a terrifying place for them. I'm not easily unphased, but that place just made me want to bring all the poor creatures home. Sometimes there's comments that organisations like the one we got Kiira from "only do it to traffic dogs for money" and similar bullshit, but if you compare the life the dogs get in new proper homes to what they come from (and the fact that the money it costs pretty much covers the neutering/spaying, transport and admin) and nothing more (actually looked up the price of having your dog neutered/spayed at our vet here, it's 20 bucks less than what we paid for Kiira), it's very obvious how nonsensical that is. Visiting that place really convinced us that taking in a rescue was the right move and that everyone who buys a 'purebred' needs to have a good think about their choices.
But we had a great trip, slept in amazing places in forests and near old castle ruins in Germany, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. If our van lives long enough we're definitely going to do some more trips around the Baltics.
Short version is: fuck people that cancel on dogsitting 3 days in advance, our van has pretty much a new engine and thank fuck we have good vehicle insurance 
