Buses and bikers

This trip was an opportunity to see the more local landscape of an area, to include how people get around. In Germany, the train is the main source of public transportation, and while we lived in the city in Poland before, I never really got to experience what the people out in the more remote areas do.

So what is the answer? Bike or bus.

I really did not see that many sports cyclists (which I'll define as a person clearly riding for sport and not transportation; they were usually the only ones wearing a helmet.) There was Pawel, plus maybe one other road cyclist in Poland, and I actually saw a group with a support vehicle in Riga. I saw a few bike tourists with the pannier bags like me. 

But there were many other people on bikes, especially in Poland: kids, grandmas, people going fishing, men using the bike as a pushable cart so they could transport things they couldn't just carry. It is quite challenging to ride with sacks of groceries hanging off your handlebars, but I saw plenty of people doing just that.

On one lonely road, I encountered a mother riding her bike with two child seats installed; one was in the front and rear facing, and one was the regular kind in the back. The third child was riding alongside on her own bike, but she was only maybe five years old. It was pretty windy at that point, so it must have taken them forever to get where they were going.

I also saw an old lady riding along on a gravel road with a cane in her bike basket. I was so impressed by that - I was struggling on these roads and this lady is just calmly riding along. She did have wider tires and was going much slower, but still! 

Your other option for non-car transportation is the bus and I passed hundreds of bus stops along my route. There was almost always a bench, but there wasn't necessarily always shelter. And some of these were in the middle of nowhere, far from any kind of building. At one point (actually, probably multiple points) I thought to myself "you know, I could just stop and wait for the bus," but wondered how long it would take the bus to get there. I realized that it was probably faster to keep riding. Except for once, when I looked at the bus stop, thought about stopping, then looked over my shoulder as a bus passed me, all in the span of five seconds. I should have flagged him down, ha ha. But it was reassuring that if I had some kind of problem, I could just get on the bus.

I also determined that the buses are slow: In Lithuania, while travelling on a road between larger towns, the bus would pass me, and pull into the stop. If people were getting on, they had to pay the driver, which gave me time to go down the road, then the bus passed me again. If you have lots of people using the bus, it can be a very, very slow process since the buses only stop if necessary.

The bus I took from Riga to Tallinn was a coach bus, more like the private charter buses in the US. Our driver was pretty fearless in passing semi trucks on two lane roads, so we were actually ahead of schedule. These are very popular in Europe and there are a few in the US, like MegaBus. 

In Riga, there were dozens of choices for destinations. Fortunately, I did not see the bus that said "Prague" until after I had bought my ticket to Tallinn and committed to finishing. Prague is only a few hours from home, so it was be really easy to get back that way. 

The train that I took in Estonia, from Tapa to Tallinn, was very nice and modern, to include WiFi. I don't think Estonia has a national railway system (like Germany and Poland do), so private companies have set up these routes and I was impressed with the whole operation, to include the smoothness of the tracks. That's very important while you are standing and trying to hold on to a very heavy bicycle.

I'm still on the ferry until this evening. Last night, they had karaoke that was mostly in Finnish, so that was my cue to go to bed early!