Ordered leg totals agree within rounding. Stop distances are approximate sums of rounded legs. Stops, delays, approach and any separate return travel add time. Basis: producer-declared routed record.
Reading history stays on this device. My road watch requires a separate selection; opening it does not subscribe this ride.
Distance and riding time are measured on the routed road. Check local closures and conditions before you ride.
From Rokiškis it runs 273 km to Rokiškis; allow about 4 h 51 of riding. The stops in between: JACOBSTADT Jekabpils, SESTU-KALNS Ziestu and back through JACOBSTADT Jekabpils. It crosses from Lithuania into Latvia - carry ID and check the toll rules. A steady touring day rather than a sprint.
Waypoint introductions and full write-ups
1. KARISCHKI Gireišiai
This stop sits in north-eastern Lithuania, in the Aukštaitija highlands near the town of Rokiškis, about twelve kilometres away, and not far from the Latvian border. The name on the map is a mixture of an old German-era spelling and a local village, and the specific site is hard to pin down, so the useful thing is to describe the country around it, which is quiet, gently rolling and full of lakes and woods.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Planning note
KARISCHKI Gireišiai is where the day begins. Next is JACOBSTADT Jekabpils.
2. JACOBSTADT Jekabpils
Jēkabpils lies on the Daugava, Latvia's great river, in the region called Sēlija, and its older German name, Jacobstadt, tells you who founded it. Duke Jacob Kettler of Courland, who ruled this land in the seventeenth century, planted a town here in 1670 and gave it his name, in the same decade he was trying to found colonies in Tobago and Gambia. The duchy was a small, wealthy state that punched above its weight. Across the river sits Krustpils, an older settlement with a castle, and the two towns grew together over the centuries and were merged in 1962.
May refer to an earlier itinerary; verify against your selected route before riding.
Planning note
JACOBSTADT Jekabpils comes up about 83 km into the recorded legs. Next is SESTU-KALNS Ziestu.
3. SESTU-KALNS Ziestu
Somewhere in the Latvian countryside, on a modest rise above the Daugava, stands a marker that was once part of the most ambitious measuring job of the nineteenth century. Sestukalns is one of the stations of the Struve Geodetic Arc, a chain of triangulation points that runs for nearly three thousand kilometres from Hammerfest on the Arctic coast of Norway to the Black Sea. The astronomer Friedrich Georg Wilhelm Struve, working out of the observatory at Dorpat, now Tartu, led the survey between 1816 and 1855 to find the size and shape of the Earth, and the result was accurate to a degree that astonished geodesists. It is on the World Heritage list, with a few dozen of the stations that still survive across ten countries.