Life does get complicated sometimes.

My plan for this summer was to ride north from northern Germany to Oslo, then east to Stockholm, then take a ferry to Turku, Finland, ride to Helsinki and ferry to Tallin, Estonia. From Tallin I'd take a round trip by ferry to St Petersburg, Russia. I'd probably leave my bike in Tallin since taking it to Russia will probably be prohibited. I do want to visit St Petersburg.

Then I'd ride south to Vilnius, Lithuania and see about organizing a trip (with or without my bike) into the now visa free part of Belarus. I don't think Belarus is particularly exciting for touring but I do have several friends whose families came from there. Then I would have ridden back to northern Germany through Poland. Now I hope I can do that European tour next summer.

Norway, Russia, and Belarus are the only three of the 34 continental European countries bigger than Luxembourg I haven't visited. Russia and Belarus will be the only ones I won't have toured in after that tour. I have toured in roughly 30 of those 34 countries multiple times.

Last summer's European tour showed me, by leaving me exhausted at the end of way too many days, that I needed to slow down. Last winter I had two incidents,the last one in March, where I lost consciousness very briefly. Neither involved bicycling. My cardiologist wanted me to wear a heart monitor for the month of April to see if it was a heart problem causing me to faint. Since I wouldn't get the results from that monitoring until May, I decide to stay in the US this summer. The results of the monitoring showed my heart was not the cause of the fainting.

I'd already planned an east coast US tour for next fall which included visits to several friends and one of my sisters, so I extended that into a full summer tour, starting in June, going north to visit friends in Bloomington, In and then heading diagonally up to Quebec City, before heading south and east to Yarmouth Nova Scotia where I'll take a ferry back to Maine and ride down the Atlantic Coast through Boston and NYC. I'll be visiting my sister in Boston and a friend in Queens. My route down the coast will take me through all three, of the lower 48, US states I hadn't already ridden across: Rhode Island, New Jersey, and Delaware.

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