TigertoThailand & elsewhere: 21st May - Lithuania heats things up!

It had been in the mid 20’s when I arrived yesterday and the night remained warm and muggy, save for the occasional thunderstorm. When I woke in the morning it was sunny and 20 degrees, lovely as long as it doesn't get much hotter I thought, not having brought any hot weather riding gear. So I set off north towards the Lithuanian border - north generally means cooler yes?

Most of the roads continued to be straight and flat, though largely through pleasant countryside. There was an awful lot of lorry traffic heading north though, I had to wait quite a while to get this shot with no lorries on it.

The border road I used must have always carried a lot of traffic as the border post area was huge, though of course now deserted, at least going north. Interestingly, though, there was a long queue of lorries heading south due to border police in vans stopping everything for inspections in that direction - I’ve not seen that at an internal border in Europe before.

There was initially no distinction on road quality entering Lithuania and I was getting a little bored of just going in a straight line.

So a little later as the road entered a forested area I pulled off onto a side road for a comfort break and looked for an alternative route that might be more interesting on the map. The problem in this area is that there are not too many options. If I headed east I would meet the motorway going into Kaunus and Vilnius, if I headed west I would pretty soon bump into the Russian border of Kalingrad (a Russian enclave).

The only options seemed to take one or more of the small local roads that seemed to loop around before coming back onto the main road I was currently using. I thought I’d give one of these a go and so off I set.

I had noticed before hat all the side roads seemed to be unpaved, so far it was OK, the gravel was quite loose in places and had large stones mixed in, but nothing too serious. However the verges were very sandy and then the road itself became more and more sandy, with some nasty soft sections here and there. I hate riding in sand on a big bike after coming off in Uzbekistan and so took it quite steady.

Eventually, just whilst I was beginning to wonder how easy it would be to do a U turn on sand I came across two wide mesh gates, either side of the road and, as they were open I rode in though ..... to then be confronted by a huge dumper truck coming the other way!! ..... seems I was riding into a quarry ... doh!

The quarry manager came across and called me in to his air conditioned hut to cool down and have a chat - one of those great chat’s when neither can understand the other but you seem to be getting on fine.

I should have mentioned, the ambient temperature was now 28 degrees and so I had been getting rather warm!

Back on the main road I continued north and noticed that towns now had the big marker posts, like I had seen across Russia and the Stan’s a few years ago.