Eastern Europe in a week

[Geoff W]

Bear with me , this is a work in progress and I am a slow learner.
So................Saturday September 3rd, I finished work  and headed down to Hull to catch the 20:30 ferry to Rotterdam. I had planned this trip for a while, but as ever , everyone else dropped out, it was just me and El Tigre heading East. The general idea was sail across the Baltic Sea and then ride back to Rotterdam for the ferry home, I had arranged some days off and holiday so I had 8 1/2 days to do the trip.
The ferry from Hull is huge, 59,000 tons and was full , mostly with freight and a load of bikers from Germany and Scandinavia heading home after the Isle of Man Classic TT. Plenty of bars to choose from including Marston's Pedigree real ale, they must have the cask on a gimbal or something. But I need an early night, a long day tomorrow.
Off the ferry and onto lots of autobahn, I need to get to Kiel to catch the next ferry, so lots of arse numbing riding. Cool but tolerable until just South of Hamburg I hit a huge storm which slowed everything to 40 mph. Rode through that and made Kiel with a little time to spare, so headed to Laboe nearby, which has the U-Boat and German Naval Memorials.
That is the last class VII u-boat left anywhere, about 750 tons, anyone who went out into the North Atlantic in one of these was a brave man.

The tower is the Naval Memorial.
Arrived at the ferry terminal in good weather, very pleasant but firm bloke at the check in desk made it clear that I was NOT going to get the ferry unless I had my bike registration document, I new/thought I had it some where. Eventually found it after much sweating tucked between some maps.
A much smaller ferry, 20-25,000 tons with one freight deck and one bar, but that is all you need, choice of Lithuanian pilsner type beer or Belgian Grimbergen, that worked well for me.

Kiel harbour, the storm I had ridden through earlier arrived as we were departing, the entrance to the Baltic- North Sea Canal is very impressive.
The ferry was about 40% full, so a pleasant trip, flat calm twenty hours to Klaipeda in Lithuania.
We arrived in the late afternoon, about 90 minutes ahead of time.

The K shaped tower is the Hotel I stayed in , this was the only one I booked before setting off, as I wanted to see the city before starting the ride.
The hotel was modern and very reasonable.............however............it had a topless bar, a strip club bar, a gentleman's club and two casinos, and all the female staff looked like models, even a country bumpkin like me could work out that this was the local mafia laundry place. The rest of the city was great, an interesting university city with plenty of good bars with multiple choices of local pioneer, and dark beers , even a couple of stouts. The edge of town had some awful Soviet era blocks, but the old part was interesting with some surprising sculpture around. The people I met were happy to chat and practice their English on me.