Sleepyhead
So, after posting this morning at 6am from the train station in Lahti I fell asleep while sitting on the coffee shops couch, where I awoke every couple minutes, mostly startled by my own snoring.
I must have been a pretty sight in skintight bike clothes in the weirdest colors, slightly sunburned and smelling like hell.
The idea was to gather enough energy to make the last 100km to Helsinki and then take the ferry to Talinn (thereby avoiding tje visa hassle with Russia for just a couple kilometers).
At around 9 I gathered my stuff and hopped back on the bike. Usually, I take cities at around 20-40km away as intermediate targets, just to keep the mind occupied and to be able to reset the counter on the bike computer more often.
Today though I was entirely focused on the end goal.
Therefore the whole section felt endlessly long, worsened by the a sleep deprived mind and a sore body.
Luckily I was able to draft behind a tractor for a while at a comfortable speed of 45km/h. I felt like the blokes from thereabouts, just cruising along at high speeds.
I invested the gained time wisely into a stop at Lidl, a German supermarket chain which obviously had managed to migrate north. The best thing about their assortment? Brezen! Not those snackable cracker pretzels, but real, actual, nice, long missed Brezen 🙂
Fueled again I tackeld the hardest part of the section: 30km of suburban sprawl. Where as in the last days I had to do a turn every 80 – 100km I was now making turns every couple hundred meters, which is really confusing and stressful, since the phone screen can’t be read properly in the sunlight.
Additionally, in the last 6 months I had mostly nature around me. During sections of the trip, where I was cycling for hours through the forest, I felt the whole magnitude of this endeavor crashing together over my head. Here I was, a tiny human on a bike, pushing the pedals to move through endlessly huge and wide landscapes, getting a feeling of how small and insignificant one person and the whole humanity can be.
And now I was heading through this endless stream of houses with small gardens, getting glimpses into the daily lives of so many people at once, being shown how big mankind can be, and how it’s mostly just the same stories just repeating itself.
One might arguably say that in my slightly impaired state or mind I was dealing with lots of stuff at the same time , so I was very happy when I made it to the harbor terminal.
I had 2 hours to kill before I could board the speedboat, so I wandered around Helsinki a little. I don’t have a knack for culture and buildings and stuff, but this place definitely seems like one could spend a lot of time exploring it.
The boat ride itself was uneventful, especially since I slept most of it.
Arriving in Talinn, I now had the task to get out of it. While cycling through it, it made a really good impression. They somehow take those old rundown buildings and just put new, shiny bars and restaurants in them, which results in a very friendly atmosphere of what the first glance seems like an abandoned neighborhood.
Under a beautifully setting sun I left the suburbs and am now in a forest between two towns. Tomorrow I’ll probably cross over to Latvia, so that then I’ll be in Riga on Friday, meeting Anete and Daina again 🙂
I’ll be catching up some sleep now, see you!
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