Sometimes the best laid plans of mice and men go astray. And so went our day today. The plan was to ride from Warsaw, Poland to Vilnius, Lithuania in a ride that was projected to be about 6 hours via a direct route there. It wasn't far out of Warsaw the the first challenge occurred. There was a major set of construction delays with long traffic lines for almost 25 miles with no exit opportunities. Once we inched our way through that, our planned road was totally closed due to construction, so I had to plan a detour route as the locals don't provide one. The only detour I could work out was about 40 miles out of our way to the west and then back east. And by now, the rain had started and persisted off and on throughout the day (mostly on). We encountered periodic construction zones and probably the high point of the day was seeing lots of storks throughout the ride.
Then came error and delay number two. The GPS routed us up Route 19 direct to Vilnius. However, I didn't note that the route passed through Belarus. When we got to the border, there was a huge backup that wasn't going anywhere. I lane split to near the start of the line and a helpful Belarussian fellow advised us that the correct way to get to Vilnius without passing through Belarus was to backtrack and take the #8 road towards Kaunus. So we turned around and headed back into Poland to find the other road. At least we can say, "We've now seen Belarus!". More rain accompanied us as we rode the 20 miles back south to the Road #8 junction and then turned back north. At Augustow, we were directed onto the 16 Road and it turned out to be a wonderful road pretty much free of the large trucks we had spent much of the earlier part of day with. The rain let up for much of this segment of the ride and we motored our way into Vilnius and found our hotel, Comfort Inn II which has secure underground parking. We parked and checked in and found our group just finishing dinner. Fortunately there was food left for us, so we joined the group for a little dinner and chatted with another couple (Shirley & Dan) about our travels as they are visiting some of the same places we have visited.
After dinner we unpacked the bike and hung up all of our wet clothes and washed a load of laundry and caught the last of the Belgium-Japan World Cup Soccer game (Belgium won 3-2) For today, it was a 11 hour, 550 plus mile day of challenging riding in the forms of road construction, rain, GPS routing difficulties. But I guess that's why we both have Iron Butt Association ride certifications. And now to kick back for a week in Vilnius.
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