Books down!

The UniCyclist takes his final exam, but his epic bike journey across Europe continues.

The studying part of UniCycle50 is now over. On 18 June I sat the exam for MT365 in Riga, Latvia, in a test room all alone. Well, there was also an invigilator. Pity.

The empty exam room probably hints that there aren't too many OU students in Latvia, but I did meet one. Paul lives on Latvia's remote coast. I visited him on the way to Riga. His tiny village, Jurmalciems, is a long way from anywhere. His home, whose garden is separated from a beautiful and beautifully deserted beach by a row of sand dunes, is a shrine to self-sufficiency. Here he grows onions and leeks, carrots and beets, all types of fruit and even his own tobacco. A lot of the fruit is turned into a range of delicious country wines. His house is like the lair of a mad scientist, with large demijohns containing fermenting liquids of various colour. I sampled a couple of his wines, a light bilberry one and then a richer chokeberry, and for a nightcap I tried his blackcurrant port. They were all much tastier than home-made wine has any right to be. You should have been there. You would have enjoyed it.

Two days later I was taking the final exam of this bike ride. I feel like I perhaps didn't do Riga justice. I was too preoccupied with revision. The day before the exam I spent so long revising in my hotel room that a couple of staff members came to check if I was alright. But what I saw of Riga was lovely. Well, the Occupation Museum wasn't lovely. Between Stalin and Hitler the Latvians had a tough time of it.

But now MT365 is done and I've nothing to study for, which is an odd feeling. Normally there is a slight sense of guilt whenever I'm somewhere and not reading or revising, but now I'm entirely free for the first time since I started cycling in March 2011. Luckily, the Kindle is stuffed full of books.

So , without an exam to revise for, or an OU course to complete, I decided to award myself a little holiday. Since my Russian visa isn't valid until the 1st of July, I have more than two weeks to kill in what little remained of Latvia and in Estonia. I've planned a lazy, 60 km per day (usually it's twice that) coastal tour of Estonia and its islands. The Baltic states are beautiful countries. The weather is as changeable as Scotland's, which makes sense given that they are on similar latitudes, but once again I've been lucky with more sun than is usually expected. The Sun God, he loves me. Unfortunately, the Wind God hates me.

The studying part of UniCycle50 may be over but there are still a lot of kilometres to be done - approximately 6,000 if I've calculated correctly. This includes 1,900 in Russia - a country that I seem to get warned about on a near daily basis - and 1,600 km in Scandinavia, 800 km avoiding a very expensive Danish ferry by cycling to the Dutch coast instead, and a final 1,600 km tour of the UK and Ireland. That should take me close to 35,000 in total. I still find it hard to comprehend how large a number that is.

And then, in September, the cycling will be done too and a big, joyous chunk of my life will be over, a chunk full of new friends, like Paul, bizarre food like the pig's ear I ate the other day, and the most wonderful places one could imagine. But the memories will last forever.