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Published: August 18th 2019
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The next morning it did not rain, at all!
So i went to Vilnius taking back roads as suggest by Mssrs Garmin, sometimes they do manage and I had a nice ride to Vilnius and a decent hotel.
Vilnius is nice, I prefer it to Riga and Tallin, as it’s a bit off the beaten track for the cruise ships that plagues the Baltic.
You have to sit in bus for a few hours to get there.
Anyway I looked at the sky when I left the hotel and thought about a rain jacket, but no, the sky looked nice.
Well 5 minutes later it laughed me in the face and let go of some rain, it did stop quite rapidly and the sun came back to stay, I just wandered around and enjoyed the splendour and the vibes of all the history here, going back a thousand years or more, well there a at least a thousand years that are documented.
More wars and ”empires” coming and going religion coming in to the pagan lands, more death and the cycle kept on until present days.
It must have been the greatest windfall of
all times for the Baltic states hen the became members of the EU and started receiving subsidies my the billions.
I think that the spent the first load of money on paint and then on improving the roads.
The next day, Minsk, well I wanted to go there and i got over the border after about an hour and then i waited another hour whilst they went through my paper work and then I was politely told to get my sorry arse back into the EU, not enough papers.
Or maybe they thought that I wanted to emigrate to Belorussia and live on welfare, funny an electrified fence and kalashnikovs, and border guards with the green uniforms as the Soviets have, well if it worked then, it works today as well.
Back to Lithuania, show all the paper work again and then off I went to Bialystok, I wanted to reach Lublin but the time spent on curvy roads drained my sap.
So there I was in Poland again, another nice country with a very rich history and old buildings and I got a nice dinner, a bit off the beaten track, hotel that was
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Somebody knew that I was coming more expensive than it was worth bu with secure parking, secure parking is nice.
The breakfast was very nice and they had one of those omelet chefs and I found, lo and behold ,some chili!
I promptly filled a teaspoon and got that beaten into my eggs
Lublin is very nice and all the Poles, be they north or south were out in their Sunday bests, walking and having ice cream and seemingly having nice time as did I.
As the sun was over the yard arm, I sat down for some nice Polish beer.
I did some more walkabouting and that is thirsty work so I found a place were some locals had the same idea and some of them had started bit early and were about three sheets to wind .
The next day I went to Wroclaw, skipping Warszaw as i’d already been there some years ago.
Wroclaw was called Breslau in the olden days before Adolf made his ill-fated European tour and was given over to Poland after the war.
The hun did know how to build nice houses, The old East German hun not so much, as
soon as you got out of the old town there were some really shoddy apartment houses, it’s astonishing to see the accomplishments of the commies versus the dreaded capitalists.
The Rathaus is quite something to behold, but I do wonder why Germany is so infested with rats that they have rat houses , what do they do with the rats? Bratswurst? The letter B is there to confuse you, me thinks.
There's one thing to be said about this neck of the woods, there are churches and cathedrals in abundance, in larger cities so many that they are within spitting distance.
Think what you want about religion but many are very fine buildings, showing great skills by the people who built them.
Time to go home, so off to Germany and to Augustusburg, place with a motorbike museum in a castle.
Some history there as well, especially as the East German motorbike manufacturer MZ anded up buying engines from Austria and Japan but in the end just died off for the lack of a competitive product..
My brain was in riding mood and I thought Magdeburg would be a nice place to stay, but
today dug up streets and one way streets and some of the hotels that the sat nav suggested weren’t even there so I thought a smaller town up north a bit would be nice.
I found a nice Gasthof and took a quick look at their parking and went back to the entrance to get myself a room and the was a bloke with a bicycle who told that hey just closed their door in his face.
It was getting latish so i broke some speed limits and probably some other laws as I sped up to Stendal.
The nice hotel that I wanted to stay in was fully booked but the got me a room in another one, the place was a bit dingy but the dinner was nice, the best on this trip.
My almost new motorbike threw a fault code and told me it needed some TLC and wanted to see a workshop.
No shops around but a good nights rest cured it.
So that was about it, backroads up to Lubeck and then slab the rest, dodging some squalls but not all of them.
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