What a ride

In the morning I jump out of bed in Nida on the Curonian Spit. I quickly made my meager breakfast, did a few strength exercises and saddled Hildegard. Let's go.

Since I went hiking in the dark yesterday, I would like to explore the spit a little more in the light today. To do this, I stop at the "Dead Dune", a shifting dune that has already swallowed up a number of settlements and has only been stopped by forest planting for around 100 years. In the past, people always moved their homes with the wind. The dune can move quite quickly - between 0.5 km and 15 km per year.

We continue through pine forest on the only road over the spit towards the ferry pier. A stop at Juodkrantė takes me to the Witch's Hill. I had already read that the spit, especially in the southwest, had previously been considered a holy place and that people held their rituals here and that shamans and witches lived here. Since Russia holds the particularly holy place, wood artists have now created a collection of inspiring wooden figures in the oldest surviving piece of high forest on the Lithuanian side. A fine excursion. It took me exactly 1 hour. With a chime to start and end. Well, if that's not magic...

After all the exploration, I'm now setting off from the spit. It's 1 p.m. and I still have a winding 380 km ahead of me after the ferry. The journey goes through rural Lithuania. Flat to slightly hilly, many small farms, some already ancient - only the single cow in the meadow shows that someone still lives here - small towns, occasionally huge churches, abandoned cemeteries and little traffic. My stomach announces itself. I promise myself that we will take a break in Jurbarkas. Hildegard gets 12 liters of 95 petrol here and I get cold summer soup. I buy a few apples from an older woman on the side of the road for the rest of the way.

Then we rush over the bridge that spans the Memel here in Jurbarkas. An old border river, notorious.

At some point I switch from 'curvy' to 'fast' in the navigation system (I'm sooooo grateful that navigation systems exist) and save 30 km. To do this I have to take an adventurous drive onto the expressway towards Poland. Huh, that was intense. Between trucks that urgently want to head west and are speeding along the road under construction at 90 km/h, Hildegard is now stuck with Barbara on top. Everything goes well, the border station sorts out the trucks. I can just keep driving. This is an advantage of the EU. I've been back in the EU since Finland.

Now it's getting dark, 8 p.m. Lithuanian time is approaching, still 33 km to bed.

Here in Poland there are more hills, otherwise not much is different. Yes, the time has jumped back by 1 hour. It's around 7 p.m. when I slowly roll through the dark forest on forest paths towards the guesthouse. Man, what did I choose here again 😅