Light at the end of the tunnel!

Just as we thought it couldn't get worse, today threw up a whole extra new level of fun to deal with.

I was sick. Couldn't eat breakfast. Hanging on to every last second of sleep before check out when we had to decide to move on or stay another night. I tried eating a bread roll and hoped for the best out on the bike, even if it meant cutting down miles just to get a little further.

Our route choice was between a fairly hairy major road with lorries thundering down or terrible-condition minor roads; zigzagging in the same direction, with less traffic. We opted for the latter, hoping for a less stressful ride and found ourselves in sand once again....total disbelief that there were 2 roads both so extremely different. Pretty unsuitable for bikes in their own delightful way! At the start of this trip never did I imagine that we'd be pushing bikes through sand for 6km through European countryside.

When we finally approached the end of the first sand road we tentatively got back on the bikes in a low gear to try and move on slightly faster. Just like when you move up a level on Super Mario, the next villain pops up. Today it was "Pepper Dog" who fancied his chances with a piece of juicy vegetarian leg. Lessons learned from previous days. = we were village-proofed and ready. No way could we out-pedal the rabies-on-legs on a sand road so we had to deploy the pepper spray on him. Boom.
Peter 1 - Dog 0.

When our route was then blocked by a huge building site we had run out of Mario mushrooms and Power Flowers, seriously questioning why the sand between our toes was monsanto-sprayed Polish farm track sand and not Koh Samui beach sand as the choice of our long summer trip. No amount of chocolate wafers was going to remedy the dark cloud that was hanging over us at that point.

Half an hour of google and phone calls confirmed hilariously that we had no option to take a train further north without going back down south, re-tracing our previous day's route.. taxi companies also just don't reply to email in English or Polish.

Without our "get out of gaol free" card, we had to carry on with today's route to Lomska.

We moved away from the small roads after needing about 2 hours to do 10km and said our prayers on the larger road instead.

Lithuanian number plates. Caravans. Motorhomes. Motorhomes with BIKES. Heading North!! All things we've not seen at all in Poland so far (unbelievable,no?!). People camping..travelling ...Leisure.

We arrived in Lomska. No concrete. Gyms. Men in shirts. Dogs being walked. More caravans. An INTERNATIONAL restaurant. A delightful child who spoke English showing us to our apartment. What was this place and where had they hidden Poland?

We are happier travellers tonight. With 2 days of Poland to go, here's hoping for some easy riding to finish. We're so close!Read more