GPS don’t know shit about geo-politics. Warsaw to Vilnius

I left Warsaw after 3 very nice days spent during working hours roaming the city or just stuck in the city’s largest book store where wi-fi internet was available, and evenings in the company of a young couple of Polish Af Twin riders that hosted me in their apartment. I decided that although it was not on my planned route, to go up north to visit Gdansk, decision that proved extremely inspired as after Krakow, the country’s major port to the North Sea became my favorite place. Wish I staid more...

After spending the night in a tiny but clean room at a roadside guest-house in the lake district of Poland near the city of Mragowo, I confidently set the Zumo to take me on the fastest route (again avoiding motorways and unpaved roads) to Vilnius. The chosen route was very nice and the warm early summer glow of a Sunday morning made riding along large peaceful lakes a delight. Not pushing it to hard as I have spotted some police cars with radar guns hiding in the bushes on the side of some roads as well because the day was inviting for a relaxed ride, around noon I arrived at the border crossing point.

To my surprise I found there long cues of trailers that made me think European regulations regarding trade are still to be perfected, or even imagine some kind of possible commercial conflict between the neighboring Poland and Lithuania. I took the lane reserved to passenger cars and entered the customs area. To my even greater surprise I have seen officers checking out documents and cars cueing and being inspected... What the heck? Can they be so much upset ones with the others as to infringe EC regulations on free circulation between member states? And what is that? Lithuania changed to the Cyrillic alphabet? It must be something rotten in Denmark... well, maybe more so where I was standing.

Only after being asked for my documents by an officer speaking nothing other than Russian I was hit by the obvious: the bloomin’ GPS considered in it’s innocent obliviousness of geo-politics that the fastest route to Vilnius was through the Republic of Belarus and couldn't be bothered to let me also know about this.

What a stupid face I must have had explaining to the linguistically opaque Belarusian customs officers that I was at the wrong border crossing point. Finally they also saw the amusing part of it and let me turn around in Poland, not before thoroughly checking my documents, the same as the Polish customs officers did this time, as I was "entering" the EU space.

The rest of the road to the true Lithuanian border was done without asking any indication from the ignorant GPS and from there on not getting any, even if I would have wanted some simply because Lithuania seems un-GPS-chartered...

From Maps

From Prague to Warsaw by Krakow

The road from Prague to Warsaw saw a very special 3 day stop in Krakow. After about more than 500km from Prague to Krakow ridden at high speeds on boring highways while being blown by strong side winds all over the road, what I was to find in this adorable city was a gift of fate.

The second lag from Krakow to Warsaw was a good lesson in how not to trust your GPS when the maps it is using are rather crap, as proved to be the case of the map of Poland contained by the City Navigator 2008 Plus from Garmin.

Although I have carefully double checked if the option to avoid unpaved roads was selected, and it was, the local authors of the map were probably too proud to admit that their otherwise lovely green country had also some roads that still wait for the people at Tarmac inc. that they marked everything as “paved” which I painfully discovered was not at all the case. So at few occasions, after the tar strip narrowed to the point where 2 (small) cars could not pass one next to the other, at some points even that disappeared into what was very bumpy dry dirt or even worse (I had to turn around there) very fine deep dust.

As I don’t like taking my motorbike on highways as they are rather straight and boring for someone liking the more “waltzing” part of motorcycle riding, I also try to avoid dirt roads, not because the trusted GS could not take them into it’s ample stride, but because I’m rather fed up with them. Not on this choice of road the Zumo made for me...

From Maps