That plan really didn’t work as intended. 151 km today.
I’ve been following Eurovelo 10 and 13, which have followed the same route. However, I arrived at a point that they diverge for the day. EV 10 headed straight south to Riga, my destination. EV 13 wandered off to the east before eventually looping back around to Riga. However EV 10 follows the highway I followed yesterday, which was terrible.
I’ve also learned something about the roads in Latvia. In OSMAnd, roads can be a brown track (unpaved ruts), white (generally paved and one lane), yellow (larger than that), orange (larger than that), red (good, major highway), and red with a line in it (separated highway, typically with trucks). In Latvia? Anything smaller than red is likely not paved. The condition of unpaved roads encountered today makes them excruciating to ride on. The big highways include many big trucks.
Given one life goal is not dying, my first 20 km headed straight east on EV 13 instead of following EV10 and the main highway south. I did take a shortcut around EV 13 after Limbazi, eventually bringing me back to EV 10, but bypassing the major highway section. That returned traffic to reasonable, with paved roads, and brought me to my destination campground at 85 km.
But I’d made good time. Still early in the day, the next town 10 km ahead indicated five campgrounds. Which ended up not being campgrounds, but some sort of fenced communities. Damn. And nothing else between me and Riga, 35 km away.
So I rode to Riga. It being flat with a tailwind saved me. I ended up a campground near the inner city (on the other side of the city).
That was a long day. While I arrived a day early, I’m glad I had already made reservations at a hostel for the next two nights. While I often rode 130 ish km on the 16-week Istanbul trip, I never broke 140 km. The last two days of the East Coast trip I rode 160 km with relative ease. The only other time I rode farther in a day was my first trip when I was 22, and racing to get back to England before I ran out of money. Then I had a day of 250 km. I hadn’t intended to put this day in the Top 5. By the end my riding started to get sloppy.
I rode most of the day with a tailwind or at least strong rear crosswind. After the first 40 km I was rarely out of sight of a car.
Ironically after going so far out of my way to avoid that damned highway I rode on it much of the last 30 km. But I also had an interlude on dirt track along a lake for quite a while.
The forecast tonight shows rain starting at 6:00 am tomorrow and ending at 2:00 pm. At least out if this I won’t be riding through that into Riga. Depending, I might just wait at the campground until the rain stops. Checkout is at 11 am, but it’s Sunday, and the informal registration process places tents randomly in a corner of the campground, so they can’t connect my tent to my registration.
Today I saw a variety of animals. More of the stork on a pole, the ever elusive hare, a herd of moose, and a peacock.
