PeterLambTravels: Day 17 - Riga

Dear all,

I phoned the bike shop in Tallin and the news could not be better: they can pack my bicycle into the cardbox and check if everything is ok with her for 9 Euro and they handle the transport with the Estonian Post (as far as I understood). They don't know the exact price for Portugal, but today they were sending 2 bike to Germany and Norway and it costed around 35 Euro. I will give it a try and go there when I will be in Tallin! Hopefully won't have any type of surprise (to take the bike home with me I would have to pay 30 Euro for bus Tallin to Riga + 90 Euro for plane Riga to Warsaw + 35 Euro for plane Warsaw to Lisbon) So, even if the price for sending the bike home is about 200 Euro, the fact of not having to transport the bike from bus station to the airport in Riga and to take the bicycle home when I will arrive to Lisbon, makes it already worthy!

I will tell you then how this story ends in a few days in Tallin!

Although it is Monday, I felt like doing everything in a slow mode and save some kilometers on Biking, catching a train to Skulke. Afterall I already cycled 900km and my goal of reaching the 1200km can be easily reached! Moreover, going out of a capital is not always simple!

I thought once more about taking a train to Valga, but I would arrive there already at night, so I kept the original plan.

Marta walked with me to the train station and helped me out to buy the tickets.

Me and Marta at Riga's train station

Marta, thank you so much for everything! See you soon!!

Train ride to Skulte took around 1h15.

Fully packed and ready to go @ Skulte

The way out of the train station leads to road A1 that connects Estonia and Latvia long the costline. Although the traffic is quite intense and with lots of trucks there is plenty of space on this road for cycling.

A1 perspective

I thought about cycling 30km till Tuja, ot about 60 till Salacgriva, but I saw one other camping about 5 km out of the train station that did not appear on the map I have, and I decided to give it a try. Moreover it was close to the beach nd had a restaurant where I could have a decent meal!

Surprise was the price of camping: 3 Lats (around 4,5 euro!!)

Typical picture of end of the day

If you ever wondered how is the process to settle the camping gear, check the following pictures:

I did not check the time for the process, but it is quite fast. The most time consuming is inflting the matress.

Well, there was a quite nice sunset on the Baltic sea. I think it is always hard to capture it on pictures, but here you have the best ones I can share with you!