We were starting to run out of time to meet Lina in Riga and in the last part of Lithuania was proving challenging as many roads are without asphalt either very sandy and/or quite bumpy. 

Now that we have seen and experienced so much more of Europe and making quite an effort to vote ourselves we wrote text messages to several of our new acquaintances and friends to remind them to vote. When Nicolas, who somehow did not manage to get an absentee ballot, asked whether he really had to vote, which meant taking a train to Leipzig from Berlin, you might image what he had to listen to, Voting in the city admiinistration in Kaunas, Lithuania elected their president on the same date. As we were also very keen to learn about the details of the election results we had booked a nice and for our budget rather expensive country hotel, because for once we wanted the (flat-screen) TV announced in practically every place on booking.com, a feature we usually ignore or use to air our clothes. 

We managed to cross the Lithuanian-Latvian border in the late afternoon on a small country road with its abandoned former border infrastructure and some simple signs signalling the speed limits and change of country. What a different experience to passing the EU borders from or to Ukraine or Belorus. We reached the hotel, (after 82 km, 28 of them on unpaved roads) just in time before it started to rain. It took a while until the guy responsible for the reception and speaking English was located by his colleague and ice hockey was on the TV in the restaurant (all evening). The room definitively wins the design price so far, small, but very clear lines, large windows, wood and light colours, very Skandinavian. The Latvian news channel announced the names and parties of their MEPs early in the evening, when everything else was still on exit polls but did not seem to cover much more or the elections (and of course our Latvian would not have allowed us to follow them either).  EUROnews was the only non-Latvian channel besides Eurosports so we watched their coverage, (some  features about four times)  until we finally turned it off at 2 am, quite relieved populist vote has not increased more and that turnout finally increased again indicating people are realizing this election matters (at least in  most European countries).

Watching election results in our favorite hotel roomUnfortunately the next day strongly suggested a strict schedule: there was medium to heavy rain announced from 10:00 to 12:00, from 13:30  to 16:00 and from 18:15 to 19:00. As the days  are fortunately getting longer we could cycle until 21:00. So we managed to get into Bauskas before the rain got really bad, found a very helpful lady in the tourist information, who upon being asked for information for cyclists provided us with 4 different maps, two of them especially for cyclists which allowed us to identify the unpaved roads (which are even more common  than on our stretch through Lithuania). She was very sorry, and not to be able  to provide all of them in their German or English version.  We assured her  she still wins the prize for 'helpful information for cyclists' and told her of our Spanish experience: where upon being asked same question, the lady looked at us and said: "Why? in Spain bikes can use any road except for the highways".  So the rest of the day we spent in cafes, while it rained with these maps, our "rainmonitor" (Regenradar) and google to locate the next town with a cafe or restaurant in order to pedal there as quickly as possible as soon as it stopped raining. 

View from our guesthouse room,just outside Riga, 3 amI can't say it was a cycling highlight but we managed to get to a very nice island  20 km from the centre of Riga, again over 80 km in only a couple of hours cycling.