Ida at Kikity airfield in Poland

Ida is a beautiful little dog. Most airfields we visited in the ex-East seem to have one of these airfield dogs, strays that have appeared one day and stayed to have their wounds tended, be fed and given somewhere warm to sleep, in Kaunas (Lithuania) a flight instructor even built the dog a dog house that stylistically matched his hangar.....

So my question for you is: do you get stray animals at your airfield? If so what do you do with them?

What we pack for a long trip: Part 1 clothes and consumables

Packing is one of the most difficult parts of our travelling.  Our bikes can be hard to get through the door if we've packed badly and they do take up a lot of space if not weight.  So we do our best to pack light to make life easy for ourselves.

I did a bit of research into travel clothing before we started out last year, and came to the conclusion that merino wool is the technical fibre of the future, as it not only breathes, it also stays clean (except if you eat spaghetti bolognaise!) and doesn't get smelly.

So the clothes I have packed are:
2 merino t-shirts.  I wear my favourite pink one 5 days a week, then it's often due for a wash.  I figure that I've now got the equivalent of 6 years worth of wear out of this t-shirt, when you consider than you (I) would usually wear a t-shirt at home once a week and only in the 6 months of a year that the season is right.

3 merino long sleeve t-shirts (this is probably 2 more than I need, but my favourite from last year is worn out and is now my sleeping shirt)

5 pairs of undies (3 would be fine)
5 pairs of synthetic socks (last year I only had one pair, this is again probably at least 2 too many)
2 pairs of ski socks for cold days
3 silk scarves
1 pair of cycling knicks
1 sleeveless jersey
winter gloves
summer cycling gloves
beanie
thick wool jumper
thick wool jacket (the brown one in every photo of me)
cycling trousers by swrve
cycling shorts also swrve
1 wool multi functional little black dress
wool stockings

1 pair thongs for the shower

1 pair cycling (cleat) shoes

1 pair boots

1 pair light impractical evening shoes to be dumped as I now have purchased some light purple outdoor moccasins

Hmm sounds like a lot, isn't too bad once packed.

Julian has gone more with the synthetic quick dry option, this means that he's got 5 long sleeve t-shirts, which have to be washed all the time, one of which is merino which is saved for wash days / can't be bothered washing days.  Last year I got him 3 pairs of silk boxers, which dry really quickly and like the hand washing.

We hand wash everything in a foldable bucket - finding a machine and waiting around for it is generally not an option for us.  Soap is soap.  I get bulk refill packs of body wash, which also takes care of our clothes nicely, shampoo also works well.  That said I have a separate mini bottle of  dishwashing liquid for the dishes, as the moisturising components of body soap are less desirable on plates.

So far this year we've had 7 days of camping without a shower, funny as last year we had only 3 days in the entire trip without a shower!  For such occasions we have microfibre cloths and the foldable bucket.

I have a Lifeventure micro fibre towel, in giant size which is light, dries quickly and is wide enough to cover me completely (unusual for a trekking towel).
Julian has a Kathmandu towel, which works well as it's waffle pattern, but is bigger and heavier, gets smelly quicker and now we have chopped 2 little pieces off it so we each have our own bath mat..

We have a whole heap of microfibre cloths for washing, cleaning the plane, wiping up spills, using as rags etc.

We keep our food supplies in a purple basket of the style very popular in Scandinavia, this includes clips for sealing open bags, salt and chilli sauce, packs of spaghetti and instant mash, and the ever increasing number of jars of jam.  No idea where they come from!   We try to eat a lot of fresh vegetables, but they are an overhead in terms of weight, going off and space. This year we are trying to carry less.

For remote camping we have an Ortlieb 10L water bladder, you can get a shower attachment for it, but we've survived without.

Riga: great sailing destination

Riga is in its own way a very pretty town.  Accomodation is fairly cheap, as is food.  There is a good, large central market, where we as tourists always seemed to choose the older not so good stuff....

The interesting thing we realised about the Eastern European states is that stuff is really pretty similar in price.  Your honey will be a better quality at the same price, having simply had the comb taken out of it, but otherwise the prices are kept down by qualitative differences.  Just as Japan gets Australia's best and most expensive beef, Europe seems to get the better cuts and what we saw at the markets was all pieces of meat that cost less per kilo but were very poorly butchered.  Imports cost the same as they would elsewhere in Europe, so are less affordable for the local population.

The view from the cathedral tower

Shaslik bbq at the midsummer festivities. The lonely planet kept going on and on about this chain of restaurants (Lido), turns out that they really do have the goods.

Midsummer market setting up early in the morning.  Many people wore these traditional wreaths.  Latvians love flowers, the difference is that that prefer a natural field mix to the very structured bunches of roses we see a lot of in the West.  This means lots of grasses and often wheat are incorporated into bunches.

We also went to a midsummer market on the other side of the river (new-er town) which was really nice, behind  Julian is a traditional style wooden house.

Sigulda

Sigulda has a massive concrete bobsled run, which sounds like fantastic fun.  We arrived there by train from Cesis on a Sunday and decided to hide from the rain for the day and read the guide book generously donated by Christian from Bonn in our really very fancy hotel room.  Of course you can only bobsled on the weekend, d'oh!

My bike as it starts to rain.  The moss on this tree tells you all you need to know about rain/humidity in this region!

Sigulda, rain, bobsleds, ravines, castles, rain, 24h liquor and sandwich kiosks, ask a policeman for directions and the one who speaks a little english asks with a sigh 'what happened...', getting lost, cable cars across the gully for more castles and how could I forget the forest, moss, lichen.... 

Latvia, Soviet infrastructure: Cesis

1 litre beer cans, well I never!

After the hassle and expense of Talinn airport we decided not to be suckers and to land at Cesis and take public transport to Riga. All our net research indicated that the bus is by far the better option, but with the bikes it had to be the train.

Flying over Latvia we were a bit confused by all the pinkish roads, a new type of road surfacing???  No, no surface.

That morning I'd called a hotel to check the pricing and we cycled directly there. Only problem, the price she quoted 'thirty-two lat', did not equal the price she wanted 42 lat. We circled around this point for a while, with her sometimes agreeing 'yes thirty-two lat' and sometimes disagreeing, 'no, thirty-two lat!' whilst pointing at the number she had written '42'.  Despite our best efforts I don't think we managed to disabuse her of the notion that 42 is pronounced thirty-two and we eventually left.  (These two sums represent €45 and €60).

We couldn't really understand why the hotels in town were full, but luckily one lady on reception kindly called around for us (we hadn't found the correct mobile provider at that point and couldn't call ourselves).  Oddly enough the hotel we'd just been at was not on her list of places to call.....  So we ended up a bit out of town, but it was cheap and a shelter from the rain.  The next day we had a look at the quaint old town and discovered hundreds of mountain bikers.  Turns out there was a race....

Cesis town walls tower

Mmm wild strawberries, just the thing for the train ride to Sigulda

Regarding Cesis airfield (link to their website), we didn't actually see anyone there, except for the watchman with his kinda scary night stick thingy.  No one wanted any payment, the watchman was in fact horrified when I wanted to give him my change as I was leaving Latvia.  So despite being on the side of a main road it seems a secure position.

It is about 4-5km to the main station, which would be an easy enough walk, the most direct way ended up via a large amount of roadworks and stone roads which was less ideal with the bikes.

Rapla, friendly people and great destination to see Talinn

We had planned to spend a weekend with the wacky parachute jumpers who'd asked whether it is possible to take the back door off our plane and jump from it, but circumstances got in the way.

Rapla houses a young and enthusiastic bunch of over 100 jumpers. They are media savvy and know how to work social networking. This meant that they had an article about us published in the local press and 3 hours after we touched down a TV camera from Channel 2 news rolled up along with a print journalist. Fantastic!
Only problem, we didn't check up on permissions for travelling to the Baltic states and it turns out that w had to ask permission to bring our home build into Estonia, d'oh!

So figuring that discretion is the better part of valour 2 months into a 6 month trip, we decided not to wait until business hours to return the missed phone calls from the Estonian aviation authority, but to depart the next day (Saturday), leaving Kuressare, a reportedly beautiful island and town and Kihnu an island where locals wear traditional dress every day for a future trip. Just as we'd been getting keen on trying parachute jumping and celebrating midsummer with the jumpers after their glowing reports :-(

If I were planning a trip to Estonia again, after getting permission, I would fly into Rapla instead of Talinn airport (contact the Rapla club first) and leave the plane there for a few days and take the train to Talinn - it's around 60km away and the train trip would be quicker than the formalities of an international airport.

Coming in to Rapla

Talinn

We really didn't know much about the Baltic before we arrived.  So we were pleasantly surprised with Estonia, the people are very polite and friendly and enjoy sharing their culture of singing and dancing with tourists (!); everyone speaks excellent English; if they do something they do it right first time and are generally brisk and efficient.  They explain this attention to detail and go ahead attitude as being due to a Germanic aspect of their culture, Talinn having been a Hansa trading guild city ruled by German merchants from 1285, who remained powerful after the Hansa disintegrated, even under Swedish and later Russian rule.

Talinn is a beautiful old walled city

The old town has two sections: upper (back of photo) and lower

The wall towers

View from upper to lower old town

Some of the Talinn highlights for us were the museums.  Kumu, the contemporary art museum cut out of a limestone hillside and the architecture museum.

Kumu, great museum, fun exhibition of busts

I loved this sculpture at Kumu

The recent art at Kumu was really good.  I posted with a video a while ago, and there were several other thought provoking exhibits (no Tracey Emin bs!). Another aspect we found really interesting about this museum was that it had sheets in each room explaining Estonia's recent history as the background information to the art.  The audio guide was of the nature of: in the middle of this painting you will see a big yellow... so I can't recommend that.

One of the displays at the upcoming garden show

Funny combinataion of flavours?  No it's all marzipan...  

The airport itself was a big international airport with all the going through security big charges hassles that you'd expect.  It cost us around €80 for landing, handling and 2 nights parking.  Knowing what I know now I would chat to the lovely people at Rapla (EERA) 35km south of Talinn and take a train up to Talinn from Rapla.

Off to Finland, oh make that Estonia

Well all good things must come to an end, and with approaching fronts we decided it was time to get on our way to Helsinki.

weather....

And in the Finnish archipelago everything looks much nicer!

Helsinki is a most attractive city from the air...

Here the port with some of the archipelago in the background

All those nicely renovated and maintained classical buildings.

In Helsinki we had to accept that all good things come to an end sooner rather than later, after 3h on the ground we admitted our defeat after finding only one hotel room available in the whole city (for €215 a night), took our bikes apart and headed off to nearby Talinn, Estonia, after checking that accomodation was no problem there (and more like €40 a night).