Encore Day 030 Riga - Sigulda

We are on the road. We collected the bicycle for Alex from very friendly Markus of eatriga.lv, who gave us very good advice on how to get out of Riga. We built an pretty adventureous suitcase construction for Alex's luggage and off we went. Surprisingly there was a very good bicycle path from the center of Riga to the ethnological museum at the city limits. The museum is a huge area of forest with many wooden houses, barns, churches, windmills etc. of different latvian peoples in it. Beautiful place. We had a huge melon as second breakfast there (first had been a Kalter-Hund-style chocolate sausage of Kristaps mom). There is also a lake nearby - while sitting on the shore we fed some very tame, but kind of psychopathic looking pigeons with sunflower seeds..
After leaving the museum the most beautiful but hardest part of the route started: a very sandy path through the forest and along lakes - the views were marvellous, but the sand definitely wasn't the easiest for beginners to ride on. But we made it - the rest of the way to Sigulda were roads. In the end we had done 75km - not bad for a cycle touring newcomer as Alex.
In Sigulda we had wonderful hosts: Dace & Aldis also had another couchsurfer, Tatjana, a russian girl. Our hosts took the three of us on a city tour by car. Sigulda has very beautiful castles - a new one and a ruined one which is used to stage opera, etc. nowadays. Once we got home we had mint tea and food while chatting in Latvian/Russian/German/English until after midnight.