Baltic adventures with Oracle Jen

We left Estonia on what might have been our 20th ferry of the trip, this time to cross the gulf of Riga.  Last time I forgot to mention the Estonian guy that we saw who must have been 80 years old cutting grass by hand (using a sythe?) from a wheelchair, Estonians don't give up I guess.  This ferry featured olympic coverage and it was great even though we couldn't understand what was said.  The coverage was non stop, sometimes just highlights, minimal commercials, and NO lame athlete profiles.  We cheer for hoop crazy Lithuania to win basketball, but I'm sure thats over by now.  We got off the boat late, located the campground in the dark, and took off for our Latvian adventure in the a.m.

More Baltic crosswinds, headwinds, and rain as I recall.  Not much scenery as the trees block the view of the sea.  But they also block wind sometimes which is nice.  While copying a map onto a piece of paper at a gas station I look up and see the Olympic ITT coverage with our clean hero Sven Tuft from Canada holding the lead until Contador took it by about a second.  Sven is known for bike touring, truely someone who loves cycling.  We watched for a while and again, non stop coverage, all TT.  I highly reccommend watching the olympics from another country!!  You'll get more coverage in a half hour in a Latvian gas station than you can spending a day on the couch in the states.  We left before the race was over and I rode inspired by Sven, using my handlebar bag as an aerobar.  But with our 40kg bikes and less watt/kg than he, we cruised at 20kph into the headwind instead of 50 like Sven can.

I actually don't know Sven personally, only thru Nat Faulkner and Matt DeCanio who both claim that he is a clean rider, unlike almost all other athletes at his level.  World records are broken all the time thanks to our good friend the chemist.  Think about why there should be anyone faster than Jessie Owens?  I like Nat's recent short blog about doping http://natbikes.com/blog/2008/07/17/156/  Another elite cyclist heavily rumored to be clean is Danny Pate who almost went to tractorfest once.  I was surprised last month when he was on facebook late at night between stages of the tour.  My mom told me he was 3rd on a stage, awesome.

So along we went until my map copying navigation failed and I made a wrong turn that led us into the ghetto of Lepaja.  After a few kilometers of run down project style housing and abandoned buildings we came upon an spectacular cathedral right in the middle of it all, so bizzare!  We pulled out our digital cameras dispite the tough/hard looking locals and snapped some shots.  Then just when I thought we were on the right track there was a missing bridge.  Kinda anxious to get back on the right road we asked a military guy (who spoke no english) and he drew us some maps on post it notes to get us going again. 

Then 15k later the sun was out and Jen picked a nice campground and I went for a swim in the Baltic sea.  Things sure can change fast in Latvia.  After some food we watched some elimination reality show get filmed called "Latvian Princess" which was down to 4 contestants sitting in a hot tub. Unfortunately it was lame like one can imagine and soon they were gone in their limo.  The next day we were gone to Lithuania.

After some terrible headwinds on our first day in Lithuania we rolled into the small city of Klaipeda and ate at a cafe.  There must be a junior program here cuz we kept seeing teenage roadies tearing around in the streets.  Great town but it was early and we rolled out of town with a surprise tailwind for our first real bandit camp of the tour (camping is allowed everywhere in scandinavia).

Our second day in Lithuania was a tough one for Oracle Jen.  After an inncident in the morning that was pretty funny and recieved a local Nelson Muntz style "HA HA" we teamed up for our second mistake of the tour.  While charging into a town for tourist info before it closed I let off the throttle confused about who had the right of way.  Jen (behind me) hit the brakes, slid out, and crashed on the slick rainy road leaving her a bit shaken up and with a big bruise on her hip.  I must say that armadillo tires have terrible wet weather traction, not to mention the tread is falling off the casing in less than 4000k!  We quickly checked into the only hotel in town which was a fancy place and had a great breakfast buffet the next day.

I have to mention that the Lithuanian pizza is great stuff and I'm sure my favorite food critics, Noah Elbers and Allen Kitscher, would agree.  Every time we had pizza in Lithuania it was real pizza, "american flatbread" style/quality with actual cheese on it, not vegetable oil cheese like typical pizza from the states.

The weather gets more like summer as we journeyed southward to Poland which greeted us with hot sun, a nice tailwind, and Oliver, a German, who waived us down to say hi after seeing us along the road a few times over the week...