This is part of the sixteenth section of our around the world trip.
Complete Trip Overview & Map

Coming from Poland or read our previous visit to Lithuania   

14/7/10 Another borderless border with another ghost town structure left for a reminder of the recent past. The road immediately improved. Gone were the ridged, frost heaved, Polish roads, replaced by a new western standard highway. We didn't change money near the border, and discovered, on two requests at petrol stations, that the Euro was not accepted and that they couldn't exchange it. This surprised us as the exchange rates of the three currencies of the Baltic countries are virtually fixed to the Euro. Perhaps it is against the law to accept Euro? So we continued onto our hotel without our usual roadside coffee, Lithuania missing out on our business. Our pension hotel, on the outskirts of Kaunas, accepted Euro for the accommodation and changed money so we could buy "coffee" and petrol.

15/7/10 Sometimes the motorcycle's problems get to us. It is old, has had a hard life, owes us nothing, but still when we get a series of rapid problems, one after the other, we wonder is it really worth continuing with the same vehicle. There are thousands of components to the motorcycle and each one has a limited life. Some, like oils, it is 4000 km's, tyres perhaps 20,000 km's, a belt for us averages 55,000 km's, an engine rebuild 220,000 km's, the clutch 280,000 km's, but eventually everything wears out, so while we are still maintaining and replacing the more regular maintenance or shorter lived components, new ones, ones that have never broken before, are still wearing out. Recently it has been the stator, then the oil seal problem, the rotor, and yesterday when we arrived in Kaunas we noticed the slightly leaking rear shock had completely given way and had dumped most of its oil, some onto the rear brake disk, the rest sprayed up over the back of the motorcycle. When is it time to retire the motorcycle? A phone call to the H-D Helsinki Dealer, and he has a sprocket shaft spacer that the oil seal runs on, just in case the old one has been damaged or is worn and is contributing to the oil transfer problem, and he also has a new oil seal, so we can replace these parts, along with the rotor, if necessary.

16/7/10 We are starting to collect ideas, photos, for what we want to do on "The Bush Block", the piece of dirt, the chunk of Australian bush, that we recently purchased north of Brisbane, where we will be spending half of each of the next foreseeable years. Ideas from some of the less developed countries, things that people still, or until recently still built, rather than bought ready made. Garden swings, log seats, fire rings, gazebos, greenhouses, log tables, tree houses etc. The more the motorcycle creates problems, the more we are looking forward to taking a longer spell, a time away from travelling, time with our family, but, like a lot of things, humans are rarely satisfied with what they have, or are currently doing, preferring something else, often something just unobtainable, just out of reach. Another lovely day for the ride to the Latvian border with more of the flat, pretty uninteresting landscape of this area of the Baltics.

Move with us to Latvia
 

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