Digital Wanderer

On Friday evening, the Riga folks picked up the minibus, packed the bikes and gear, and headed to Daugavpils. By nightfall they were here, and by that time we had already unhurriedly stuffed our bikes into boxes, and were slightly excitedly awaiting the start of our adventures.

How did we travel?

Montenegro 0 - trip there

I want to say right away that my photos are all mixed up — almost everyone took them, but mainly Doomer, Oleg, Max, and Rob. All copyrights remain with the authors, but I won't have the energy to specify who took the photo every single time. A big thank you to those who weren't lazy and took pictures even when they had absolutely no strength left. I don't have a camera, so I just shot documentary stuff on my phone.

Here's how we got ready:

Meet the heroes of the story: Doomer.

Doomer, aka Yura Baranov. A sysadmin, always cheerful, drunk and young, the life of the party. An experienced netizen, but in real life he trolls softly and good-naturedly, which brings out positive emotions in everyone. When he gets trolled himself, he pretends to take it at face value (a popular counter-trolling method). Loves to talk, but isn't averse to listening either.

Without Doomer, our trip would have been completely different, because a group always needs an instigator to ignite the hearts of already pretty exhausted people, and to dissipate brewing conflicts with jokes.

Doomer is a Sysadmin by trade, but as we can see, he has neither a beard nor a sweater. Instead, he has sparkling red Superman undies, which we will see later on.

Doomer, like me, is carrying a bit of extra weight, so climbing uphill is a real challenge for him. But not once did we hear a complaint or the words "I can't do this anymore". Even if it takes a thousand years, Doomer will climb to the highest peak in the world with his bike. For this, Max and Visla awarded him the title of "Captain Slow". Everyone knows it, right?

Curiously enough, all 9 bicycles fit into the vehicle, but only packed up, meaning in boxes, and even then just barely.  Well, you can see it all in the photo.

This is how we slept on the way:

and like this:

and like that:

This is Olga Luksha, Robert Luksha's wife

Olga is incredibly athletic, yielding in this perhaps only to her husband, next to whom she looks quite harmonious, practically living up to the saying "Husband and wife are one Satan". She attentively listened to my schizophrenic tall tales about Vietnam and sci-fi whenever we ended up side by side on the trail, and generally looks around with interest, and frequently smiles and rejoices. She works in IT, as a QA tester.

I have a blindfold like that too, a useful thing for those who are bothered by the Yellow Face when trying to sleep.

We saw all sorts of interesting things along the way.

Castles

Shell gas stations

You can read about this and other very interesting things from the history of the oil industry in the captivating (at least, in the first part) book "The Prize" Download

In Poland they have these e-boards with the temperature, the future is already here!

The future is already here — it's just not very evenly distributed.

Looks like a piece of a giant caterpillar, but apparently these are some kind of mini-garages right in the parking lot. Max seemed to say he used to have one like that

I hadn't seen priority signs in Latvia made of separate pieces before. My comrades told me that ours are also made of pieces, but there's no such thing as a T-shaped priority sign.

Right at the gas station in Hungary they sell Tokaji wines, which I read about in my childhood in Dumas's "The Three Musketeers".

This is from some tourist propaganda, but nevertheless.

Doomer couldn't resist the temptation, and bought slivovitz right at the gas station, on the way there, even though its price tag there was far from trivial. But a sweet-talking salesman and a fancy-shaped bottle did their dark deed.

Sometimes you have to do it like this

This is probably terrible compromising material and a safety violation, but I couldn't resist showing how tourists contort themselves just to brew some tea.

A beautiful piece of toilet kitsch, I think it's on the Hungarian-Serbian border

Driving 30 hours straight requires a fair amount of patience

But you'll soon see that we've got plenty of it to spare

White people – to the left (EU citizens), the rest – to the right

It's nice to be white, it really warms the ego and soothes the soul. Unfortunately, in reality, for crossing the EU border there is no difference – you just have to get lucky.

We tried to stop as rarely as possible, only for toilet breaks

If you have spare cash, you don't even need to bring food with you – they sell quite tolerable sandwiches at gas stations, sometimes hot dogs and other fast food. I took a little bit, taught by my past experience traveling to Crimea, and did the right thing.

In general – the trip there was quite tolerable. In the past I would have died driving 30 hours in a car, but over the last few years I've gotten healthier, and smarter too. At almost every stop I did some exercises like arm swings and squats – this might look weird, and sometimes my strange movements embarrass people around me, but it is ideologically correct for my lifestyle, and it incredibly helps to endure numb limbs and fatigue on the road.