So I should post some pictures from yesterday.
This only after 2.5 hours...I can imagine what I looked like at the end!
The car ferry for .60EUR
The view from my room
They brought me this plus soup for dinner. It was great!
You may notice there are no pictures from the Poland/Lithuania border. That's because there aren't any...I think that region is kind of an understood "gray area." The only way I could tell I was in Lithuania was that the railroad crossing sign looked different. And the road was no longer paved.
Yesterday was by far the toughest day of the trip. It was physically and mentally draining, and I remember being on the car ferry and thinking "well, I can be to the hotel by 7pm...that's not terrible." When I finally arrived at the hotel, I had not known that Lithuania is in the next time zone. So it was actually 8pm. The hotel's hospitality is probably the only thing from going off the deep end.
The owner was in at 7 this morning to make my requested eggs and bread. She also brought outmeal, and four hardboiled eggs. It was quite a nice breakfast, actually.
When I woke up at 5am (couldn't sleep anymore), the technology gods were allowing me to use my laptop on the internet. I checked the route and realized that there was lots of gravel road travel today. After yesterday's experience, I re-routed myself to stay on paved roads when possible. It added about 20km/12mi, but it helped me to get a lot of mileage under my belt before tackling the gravel.
As I passed a bus stop, this old guy gave me a shout and a thumbs up. That was a nice change from people just staring at me.
I would love to tell you about the things I saw. However, I was just trying to get through the day as fast as possible. Sometimes there were farms; sometimes forest. There were downhills and uphills when approaching a river or train overpass.
Just pretend this is what Lithuania looks like...that's pretty much it.
The winds were still in my face, but not as bad as yesterday. To combat this, I spent a lot more time on the drops today. (For non-cyclists, those are the curved part of the handlebars. You get lower and more aerodynamic, but it can get tiring on the back.)
If there was a decent paved road, here is what I did: ride in the drops to a count of 100, sit up a bit and recite the alphabet. Repeat until reaching Latvia, or about a million times, whichever comes first.
When I got to the unavoidable gravel sections, these were also better than yesterday. Being able to pick the right place on the road to ride makes a big difference, so maybe it helped that I now had more experience. But it also seemed that these roads were either a) better maintained or b) less used and therefore less destroyed. I did a lot less skidding and fishtailing today, thank goodness.
Finally, I reached the border.
Since I missed my Lithuania border sign the day before, I just turned around and took this picture.
(Shh...Don't tell anyone.)
It was only another 45 minutes to my hotel. I'm looking forward to a good night's sleep!
Today: 184.5km/110.7mi and 8:20 ride time.
Totals: 1527km/916mi and almost 71 hours of riding.
Tomorrow, it is basically the tour of Latvia from south to north, to include riding around Riga. It looks like they have a good bike path network...but we'll see.
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