After having survived the hippie-festival the biketour was heading Riga. We had 2 days to make the ~170km. Quiet tough, regarding that normally, we do normally between 40 and 80 kilometers per day… But we had a good road and not really any questions about the way. Just all the time along the coast. Never ending pinewoods on both sides of the road, every now and then a tiny village. Just cycling and cycling and cycling, meeting others having their break aside the road or on the beach, passing them, meeting someone else pulling a trailer, having a break and seeing the others cycling past.
The scouts found a beautiful campside on the beach. The small path going off from the road was marked with a bright yellow vest on the electricity powl. After having crossed the forest, a big bay appeared. Nothing but water, sand and forest. Bit by bit all the cyclists arrived and were really overwhelmed by the beauty of the place. Some of us went to “swim”. It was not possible because of, firstly it was not deep enough, no matter how far you would walk, and secondly it was also increadibly cold, that the feet were hurting after 1 minute from being frozen. In the forest a incredible carpet of moss was growing. It was very thick and when walking barefoot on it, it felt like cotton wool. For dinner, we had a nice meal with mushrooms from the forest.
Because we only made 80 the day before, 90 were left to Riga. We wanted to get up and start early to cycle. In the morning, one of us had a flat tyre. We were not able to find the hole, although 5 people were sitting around the pumped inner tube, turning it and trying to capture sound of air coming out. So it was put back on the wheel. Nobody knows how it lost all of its air over night.
So then we could start with some delay. The scouts and trailers already had left. Basicly the landscape was the same as the day before: Pinewoods. At some point, our never ending, pretty calm and nice road ended, joined a bigger one. It was at the beginning of a big construction side, where again one of us had a puncture. He discovered some more serious problems on his bike, had to true the wheel and adjust the brakes. So the rest of the group decided to have a break next to the building workers and their excavators and dump trucks. Somebody started a fire for boiling water to make some coffee. On the foundation for the new road, right next to the traffic light that makes the cars stop until all the traffic from the other direction passed the one-way-passage.
Every problem can be solved, so the group could go on. Freshly recovered and energized by the coffee, we crossed the construction side. Just that the time, the traffic light was red for the cars from the other direction, was to short for a cyclist to pass the one lane gravel-road. So we had to share the space with trucks coming from the front… Other Ecotopistas didn’t even care about these traffic lights and just went on cycling. Not such a big difference in the end…
When approaching Riga it started to rain. We didn’t even know where exactly our sleeping place was in Riga. It still had to be confirmed. When it finally was, we looked up the adress, just to find out, that was on the completely opposite side of the city, so some more 10km. While researching that, slowly the whole group accumulated on some street in Rigas suburbs. It was already darkening and raining even more. We decided to split up in two groups to cross the town, one faster one, that would also get some food and another one, going directly to the place. So we started to cross the unknown metropolis through night and rain… The fast group got totally lost, found some awesome dumpsters full of peaches, bread and avocado, cycled through lakes that once were roads and finally reached the destination. Just some minutes before the others, who had to struggle with the third puncture on our longest cycling-day of 2016s biketour.
