76.02km – 9H44’
Altitude : 38m
It’s a magnificently gloomy day, really cold, with exactly the same road as yesterday, lined by forests and straight as a die. Luckily, to relieve the monotony, at km 60.5 there is a policeman checking papers at the border crossing, which is behind the bridge that spans the river separating the 2 countries. René reminds me that we have crossed one city (Birzai) and 2 villages.
On this flat terrain Serge keeps up a good speed, his pace is alert, almost fast and he is averaging about 8km/hour. Could it be a favorable wind that is responsible for today’s good race?
Serge is thinking about a lot of things these days. You will tell me that is all he has to do all day long. His thoughts are diverse and varied: the day this adventure ends, there will be the organization of the American race we are planning…. Rain accompanies us during the last 6 km of the day and this evening it’s still falling. There are days when even if I search very hard there isn’t much to tell or say… or I’m not in the mood, but the next day everything is better. Tomorrow we hope to have a temperature that will climb above 10°C, for our crossing of Riga, the capital of Latvia. For the moment, we are still in the countryside, which I find bleak. René says “it doesn’t exude prosperity,” which is true. If Romania and Bulgaria sometimes think they are the “poor relatives” of the European Union, I don’t know how I would qualify the Baltic countries. We have six more days to get a more precise idea because we are only midway through these countries.