A Day on the Spit

It was a longer day on the bikes today. 60km in temperatures in the high twenties, clear blue skies, but thank goodness a sea breeze. As always on a bike, it was a head wind.

The miles we clocked up were on the Curonian Spit, a 98km Unesco-protected stretch of sand. 

Legend tells of a (very large in size) daughter of a fisherman took sand in her apron to help the fisherman having difficulties in the wild weather of the Baltic Sea and deposited the sand which created a lagoon. (Now that is the extreme Readers Digest version of the story).

 

We started with a visit to an Amber museum/shop/gallery to hear about Baltic amber. Amber drink is made from sitting alcohol in small chips of amber for at least a month. Just what a girl needs is a sip of this before getting on the bike. One of its qualities is to enhance the production of family life. Only a minuscule amount needed for David here.

Being an area with a long history of fishing villages there are many signs of the past. These now ornamental weather vanes were once found on the masts of fishing boats. The colours indicated the village a fisherman was from and the more ornate carvings told a story of his life.

This spit has some of the highest drifting sand dunes in Europe. Our English speaking group returns from the top of one of the dunes where 4 villages are buried underneath. Between the 17-19th centuries the village moved 4 times because of the drifting sand dune.

A walk up and down the hill of witches where carvings on oak trunks tell of fairy stories on the way up. This carving is the first one, the story teller. And on the way down are the darker stories with carvings of dragons, bad witches, ogres and other creatures.

There were miles of great asphalt cycle paths through the pine forests that made for cooler shady cycling.

This has been a day to work up an appetite and earn a long nights sleep.