Death-knell for a town

The beginning of the end for Visaginas started at 01:23 on Saturday 26th April 1986. The death-knell for this town, which was created from virtually nothing by the eastern European USSR economy started with the destruction of reactor 4 at the Chernobyl RBMK Reactor. Originally Visaginas was simply a small collection of houses with a population of a few hundred, that grew to support the construction and operational teams that run Chernobyl’s sister plant at Ignalina. Swollen at its peak to almost 34,000 individuals, the four lane roads, the infrastructure and the support services needed to support working families and the 5000 individuals involved in the operation of the RBMK are now decaying. The present from the power plant to the town in 1975 was a giant granite boulder which symbolised the towns birth on 10th August. Wandering around the abandoned grounds, riding the half closed and empty roads and watching children play in abandoned playgrounds amongst the soviet style concrete block housing was a surreal moment.

The town that died

A Clockwise Scandinavian Loop

This year I am returning to one of my favourite biking destinations and will be spending late summer riding north to Scandinavia. Leaving the UK, riding up through Denmark and into Sweden via the Frederikshavn ferry and avoiding the popular and contested fjords and spending time island hoping skirting the Barents Sea exploring the Atlantic Wall. Having been to NorthCape in previous trips I am pushing further east and am planning to skirt south on the Finnish Swedish border riding the east coast of the Gulf of Bothnia and picking up a ferry from Helsinki into Tallinn and south through Poland to meet friends in Krackow and then stopping in Lienz to re-ride the Großglockner before riding home via Macon – planning will be on the fly, as in past years all I have arranged is a return Le Shuttle and one night in St Omer – excited already…

2017 In Planning