Klaipėda — Grobiņa / Liepāja

This post is part of adventure Baltic Sea 2017

Day 20 I left my cosy hotel at 9am and cycled to the city centre. At the granite monument Arka (the Arch), a cyclist asked me where I was coming from, where I was going next and we started a chat. Marius is a Warmshowers member, but usually hosts cyclists in his own hostel. He kindly offered me to show me how to get to the EuroVelo 10 and we cycled together for a while.
Such a luxury! I felt like on a highway. The EuroVelo 10 cycle path took me with a short interruption close to the latvian border.

After having crossed the unspectacular border to Latvia, I followed the main A9 road to Nīca. There I unfortunatly took the 3 km shorter secondary road to Grobiņa and was after a while lost on a never ending gravel road. There was little traffic on that road, but the few vehicules I met there did not paid attention to the cyclist and passed me by without reducing their speed. Because of the dust clouds and flying gravels I then preferred to secure my smartphone in the handlebar box.
As I finally reached Grobiņa, I was welcomed by Agnese, the wife of my Warmshowers host Mārtiņš, their little boy and their playful dog. Mārtiņš came home as I had taken a shower, we took a meal together and later went with their little boy by car to Liepāja. The remaining buildings from the pre-soviet time are costy to maintain evidences of the rich past of the city. And the industrial areas we travelled through before reaching the city centre are hard to remove aftermaths of the former state-trading soviet system.
We walked through a vaste park close to the seaside and on the beach before going back home.