Can I Unicycle Across a Country Using ONLY Hiking Trails? Day 10

Thank you AG1 for sponsoring this video. Good morning and welcome back to my journey attempting to cross Latvia on my unicycle along the Baltic Forest Trail. It is day 10. Today's very exciting. Today I ride into Riga. Yeah I'm looking forward to reaching the city and seeing what there is to see. Right I'm gonna get up. I slept properly deeply last night. I think I just went to sleep and then suddenly I was awake and it was morning. I've just been wandering around a little bit and I can tell that my knee is still not great. So I've definitely done something to it. All the way to Riga is pretty much on paved surfaces I think so that will help put less strain on my knee and once we're in the city I'll be able to take some time off to rest it. So these are positive things. I think I've got around 35 kilometers to ride today and if it's all on paved surfaces like this then I should be able to do that in no time. Providing that my knee continues to let me cycle. It seems okay you know it's manageable. If we hit any steep hills or any rough tracks I don't think it's going to hold up to that but this kind of cruising on flat surfaces smooth surfaces it feels okay. I've been really enjoying seeing how the sort of light plays on the trees especially in the mornings. It's just so pretty here. I'm just entering the village of Aldiri and there's a lot of very expensive looking houses around here and a lot under construction as well. I think I'm going to find somewhere here to have some breakfast. According to my map there is a little beach by a lake just up here and there's a little bench and I reckon that's going to be the ideal spot to cook some food. You may have noticed that my diet hasn't been all that varied during this trip. This was mainly due to my unicycle's limited carrying capacity. Because of this I gravitated towards buying dense staples like porridge and lentils and supplementing these with versatile veg like carrots and peppers. 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Just pushing through the forest yeah there's a lot of very fancy looking houses out here. This one's fun. I'm now following the course of the main road into Riga but I can hug these like parallel roads which is you know pretty pleasant to be honest apart from the noise to my left. I haven't been in many towns in Latvia but the ones I have been in I've found have a pretty good cycling infrastructure like the fact that I can follow this main road without actually being on it and being away from the cars is quite a big deal. So made it to Riga. I'm still pushing to get to the center. It is challenging riding I'll tell you that much. Unicycling through cities is always slightly touch and go but I managed to navigate to the center without too much incident. There's decent cycle paths but some of the roads are completely cobbled which isn't ideal. Hearing music coming from Freedom Square I pushed towards it to find out what was going on. So I made it down to the Freedom Square in Riga and having a big celebration because the Riga or Latvian basketball team came fifth in the world championship. I'm now making my way a little bit away from the center to where I'm staying in Riga and I'm very much looking forward to having a wash. I don't know why I'm so grubby. It's only been three days since I last washed but I just feel filthy. And just like that I am clean. So I'm staying in a lady called Mara's apartment. I'm staying here with two cats. This is the brave cat. Dog hello. Hello. And this is the scaredy cat over here. Yeah I haven't been able to stroke this one yet but it just keeps running away from me. It's taken me 10 days to get from the border to Riga. I'll take a couple of days off here in the center and then we'll make the push towards Lithuania. That's the end point of this ride. So I'm over halfway which is very exciting. I've got no idea what the trail is going to be like the other side of the city but we will find out. And then later tonight another cycle tourer is turning up but you'll learn more about him later. We're just going to take over the streets of Riga. So this is Sylvain and for the last few months he'll be making his way across Europe on his 36 inch touring unicycle. So my goal is to go from France to Estonia. At the moment I've been doing a first section from my hometown Le Mans all the way to Hamburg only on unicycling. Then I took a train to Linz. I've been unicycling on an EV6 from Linz to Vienna and then the next part was from Poland all the way to Riga following the sea coast. It's always fun seeing the different takes on the problem of how to pack large amounts of gear onto one wheel and Sylvain's colourful rig was no exception. As his unicycle was loosely based on my own world touring uni I was very curious to learn about the design choices he'd made preparing it for the trip. So then we had like this kind of flap. The goal of it was to avoid this bar to bend because the the tube going through when I get to Belgium it was like in banana shape and I don't think it would have resisted all the way to Estonia without it. If you'd like to see the full video of Sylvain talking about how exactly he made his rig I've uploaded a Patreon exclusive video of him explaining all the little details and spoiler alert one of his main components is actually 3D printed which when I found out absolutely blew my mind. It's like you're not so much higher but you're just so much more intimidating going on something like this. This looks like a monster truck unicycle. It was total coincidence that we happened to be rolling through Latvia at the same time and as it's a real rarity for two traveling unicyclists to intersect we decided we'd join forces once we left Riga, taking on the next section of the Baltic Forest Trail together. Now we go straight to new horizon! As I have much less admin to deal with than Sylvain I spent my time walking Mars the Dog, picking up food for the journey ahead and just riding around seeing more of the city. I can't tell you how nice it feels to ride unloaded. Riding with bags is fun because you've got everything you need but it just makes the unicycle so unmaneuverable. Not really sure where I'm going but I'm just enjoying the ride. I might pop into the old town and tackle some cobbles. My time off the trail was a healthy change and my knee niggle seemed to have all but disappeared. I mean it'll be a real test once I'm loaded back up and on the trail but no complaints just around town. Well so it's just straight down this one? No we go right. Okay sweet. As well as letting us crash at her place Mara invited us to the beautiful red domed Riga Circus. As the director she was excited to show us the renovation work that had recently been completed. Everything that was done was actually done to think about how to make it usable and beautiful. It's not like oh we want to renovate it as it was in you know 135 years ago when it was built. More like keep the different periods available there. So now we're in the backstage area. This used to be the elephant stalls. Apparently there were six elephants but seriously you don't know how to put them because they went all out there. Yeah. So now we have these great gates. Close them down and we close both of them and that becomes a public area where we can put like sofas and cafe and when we have more audience we don't have a lot of place. Or when we need a bigger backstage we just close those doors. When I designed it then I told like to the constructor I said I want to have two planktopises and 10 vertical ropes being able to be ringed at the same time. Okay. So that's what it took because like planktopise needs like three tons each and a vertical rope needs two tons each and the planktopise needs to be able to handle a dynamic force to all the directions. So in the end it creates something as massive as this. It was here outside the circus that Sylvan and I organized a meet and greet for anyone local that wanted to come down and say hi. Yeah cool. Nice one Dimitri. Yeah sweet. On the last evening we made it down to the local circus school and watched the kids there play unicycle basketball which was frankly extremely impressive. And that's about it for my time in the capital. The next morning Sylvan and I will be packing up our unicycles and heading west towards Kolduga. But to see how we get on navigating the differences in speed due to our different wheel sizes and tackling the lumps and bumps of the forest trail well you'll just have to tune in next time. R&Ds if you're impatient you can sign up to my Patreon and watch the next episode right now. The choice is yours. Goodbye.