Riga

Friday, 17 July

My morning walk was along the Baltic Sea, only a few minutes from where we stayed for the night. The sea was empty of ships or land masses. It was quite wonderful and desolate. The beach was littered with feathers though. I first thought a bird had died and the feathers cast about but since I couldn’t see or smell a carcass and there were hundreds (maybe even thousands) of feathers along the coast line I was walking, I assumed it was just feathers from sea birds. Some were like down and most were of an average size but there were feathers over 40cm long. I thought they may have been stork but the largest feathers they have are black and all the large feathers I saw were white. They would make gigantic writing quills.

The roads we travelled upon were old requiring to go 70km/h or they were brand new (funded by the EU) requiring us to go 70km/h as no lines were painted. For most of the highways, there is a half car width of bitumen on either side of the road. It was a bit strange as you can’t safely pull over on it but I quickly realised what it was for. The common practice seems to be if you are happy to do the speed limit, you put your right wheels over the line into this extra area, this lets the over-taking car to do so. The on-coming cars use their extra area to get out of the way of the car barreling down the middle of the road.

We came to the large city of Riga before lunch with our GPS taking us to the streets where the buildings are all Art nouveau. It was an amazing walk around with Dee getting very excited and taking many photos. We had a break at Costas Coffee as we saw dark clouds rolling in and 15 minutes later we were hit with a massive rain and hail storm. We decided to stay and have lunch and wait for it to pass as we didn’t bring any cold and wet weather gear. We also had some good directions and a hand drawn map (on the back of a Tinkerbell colouring in sheet of paper) from the ladies who served us so we could get back to Springy.

Cobblestones are de rigueur in Riga *boom boom*. It’s very quaint and perhaps keeps the speed down but I think it plays havoc with Springy’s fuel tank. After leaving the town and trying to get up to 70km/h, she started lurching again. We originally thought it was bad fuel but since we had already used ¾ a tank without issue, we are now thinking we have a rusty fuel tank and the bad banging about on the cobblestones has vibrated things about. Luckily we now a have a re-usable fuel filter that can be easily cleaned when this happens.

We crossed into Lithuania without Dee finding a Latvia badge, so I suggested that we order one on-line but that, apparently is cheating. After checking our finances, we’re spending the night at a hotel, the first hard accommodation since leaving London over 2 months ago.