This part of the spit belongs to the Kaliningrad region, the village of Morskoye on the map, and the border at its northern end is not a crossing point for tourists, so a rider on the Lithuanian side cannot simply carry on along the road. Nida is where the Lithuanian part ends.
The spit itself is a thing of wonder. It is about a hundred kilometres long and in places less than four hundred metres wide, a ribbon of dunes and pine forest between sea and lagoon, shared by Lithuania and Russia, and listed by UNESCO in 2000 as a cultural landscape. For centuries the villages here fought the wandering sand. Some were buried and moved, and the forest that covers the spit today was planted in the nineteenth century to hold the dunes. The highest, near Nida, rises about fifty metres, one of the tallest shifting dunes in Europe, and from its top you can see lagoon on one side, sea on the other and, to the south, the Russian dunes marching away.
Nida is a pleasant fishing village, where Thomas Mann built a summer house in the early 1930s, where smoked fish is sold from stalls and amber from souvenir shops, and where the beaches are wide and white. The road along the Lithuanian part of the spit is lovely: a quiet, curving single carriageway through pine and birch, with glimpses of water, and an entry fee collected at the gate. Speed is limited and enforced, as it should be in a national park.
Nida has about sixteen hundred people, with limited services, so fill in Klaipeda, the ferry city to the north, before you cross by ferry from Smiltyne. Summer brings crowds and mosquitoes, and September has the best light. Winter is cold and windy, and the empty beach is bleak and beautiful.