MAY 18. SUMMER!

At 4 pm, after the usual refuelling, Normunds’s BMW’s starter stops working. It takes us about an hour to identify the problem. It turns out to be the battery, which has simply run out. We start to stress, because we have to figure out how to get a new one. The closest town is 100 km away. Janis takes the lead and offers his solutions. We change the batteries between Janis and Oskars motorcycles, Oskars has a carburettor which needs less power- this works. We succeed to run the ride by transferring Oskars’s motorcycle’s power to Normunds’s BMW. We’re on the road again! 

After 50 km on the highway, the last amount of power which kept Oskars’s alternator alive, has run out before a long elevation, which makes the thought of pushing dreadful. What’s funny- 300 m before us, a company of 3 men on an Ural motorcycle have also stopped, they tell us that they ran from the police until they got on the highway, where they ran out of fuel. As they say themselves, they appear to be a little tipsy. They agree to an exchange deal. There, on the highway, we hand over our emergency fuel bottle and they give us one of the Ural’s half dead batteries. The three cheerful men push their motorcycle on the highway together and drive off before us, their clothes fluttering in the wind. We follow them. After a few kilometres, there’s an exit that leads to a village with a car repair workshop, which, thankfully, works on a Saturday evening and sells Chinese batteries for 20 euros. The three joyful men invite us to celebrate this, but we call them some beers and continue driving. The sun is already setting when we find a place to camp at- at a meadow near the highway and a quarry. 520 km covered today.