Overland with Kids

AJ says:

“Who is Lenin anyway?”

Mum says:

“He was a very important and clever man who played an important part in Russian history”.

AJ says:

“What? Is he famous like Jackie Chan?”

(……….The mind boggles!!!!………………………)

If we had our time again we would have crossed the sea from Estonia to Finland and then entered Russia from there to visit the famous Gulag Archipelago on the remote Solovetsky Islands. We could have then worked our way down to Kizhi to see the multidomed Transfiguration Church before hitting St Petersburg and Moscow. That had been our original plan sometime way back in our trip. Instead, it could now only be a dream as, worrying about time and expense and largely governed by our visa dates, we decided that any part of Scandinavia and the Solovetsy Islands would have to wait for another lifetime - we’d done well so far.

En-route to St Petersburg

Having driven about 80km toward St Petersburg, we were waved down by the Police for a cursory check and advised that we should have stopped by the road works sign. Making sure we were on track and still getting used to the Russian highway, we had missed this. The policeman was nice and seeing all our paperwork was in order, wished us good luck and we were on our way. The motorway wasn’t too bad - pretty good sealed conditions and although there were road signs in cyrillics everywhere - St Petersburg was translated to English - it would be hard to miss the direction we were heading. On the odd occassion, the roads were rough in places but generally good and they are excellent approaching St Petersburg. Unkempt wooden houses everywhere litter the countryside between major towns with some unsightly industrial buildings. What grabbed us most were the huge white road side flowers which are common in the UK (we can’t remember their name) growing everywhere in huge big clumps all along the motorway. We have seen any amount of onion shaped cathedrals/churches of every shape, size and colour - they are everywhere.

We made our way to the south of St Petersburg through very wide long, busy through roads, bought a map of the city from a petrol station then suddenly changed our minds against visiting Solovetsky - it would be our last chance - and began an attempt to head north to the Gulag. But we took the wrong motorway and ended up driving some way further south of the city instead eastwards (we realised our compass was broken about the same time) - our cyrillic reading was bad and we were heading for Moscow. Late at night, tired, in the dark and with huge swathes of mist begining to blanket the motorway, we tried heading around our error for a little while but eventually abandoned the idea as madness. We pacified ourselves with the knowledge that to visit the islands would take several days out of our journey coupled with 2-day full-time drives each way. The full scale of Russia was beginning to dawn on us. Then, there would be a ferry and accommodation to organise once there and we’d want to see Kizhi and the lake on our way back plus a couple of other spots we had our eye on. We knew there would be a couple of reasonable locations part-way en-route we could base ourselves, but we surrended to the night and the conditions and headed back in the general direction of St Petersburg. We put our heads down with the lorries on the outskirts of the city somewhere with the children long asleep.

In St Petersburg

Next morning we woke to blazing daylight and sunshine - it was 34 degrees when we finally reached upper central St Petersburg (we heard the UK had reached similar temperatures). We were tired, melting and Andrew was still in recovery mode from his ear infection - he had done most of the driving from the previous night. We’d already had a reccy of southern St Petersburg the day before but driving through again and then onto the central part of the city is not for the faint-hearted. St Petersburg is huge, the drivers are mad, the roads are wide with traffic, there are lots of accidents, the cyrillics completely alien and you have to have your wits about you due to the sheer volume and craziness of it all - and we had rumour that Moscow would be even worse.

After driving for a couple of hours getting lost, getting to grips finally with our map and the cyrillics a bit better and then enjoying the street lined plentitudes of huge, grand, awe-inspiring buildings, monuments and churches - not to mention the rivers, bridges, one way streets and then the islands we passed over, we finally stopped somewhere on the Vyborg side to get our bearings and to try our luck with accommodation. No joy, we headed off again. This time we succesfully navigated ourselves to nearby Vasilevsky Island.

We couldn’t park on the road we wanted to find cheap hostel accommodation so found another. Here we found Hotel Prima, enquired about the prices using pictionary style language (drawing a stick man, woman and two children with their ages to explain our requirements), died of shock at the prices, scouted around more, decided we were too tired, hot and hungry to try to find something cheaper, let alone move to find a rare parking space - it would take a huge effort. Back to Hotel Prima, we booked ourselves in and went off for a quick walk to find the nearest bar restaurant for a much needed late breakfast and some rest.

We hit on a sushi bar (we had never tried before) realising at the same time that we weren’t far off hitting our 100th day on the road - what better way to celebrate than with chopsticks! The meal was fantastic though we cheated a little with mainly cooked dishes - we thought the children might not eat raw sushi and we didn’t want to risk wasting more money.

St Petersburg was very expensive for our budget. The hotel cost us 125 euros and the meal we had, a whopping 70 euros including two rounds of celebratory drinks for all of us. The White Nights continued to allow us to have effectively a double day in one so after our late breakfast come lunch, we returned to the hotel around 1pm and slept on and off till 5pm. Between times, the children had stripped off their clothes and jumped, together with entourage of toys, into the huge swimming pool that was our bath complete with whirlpool jets - all the comforts they could imagine (none of us had seen a bath since Austria and before this, at home in the UK). We had a bed each (four beds) with incredibly high ceilings - no hard earth ground to have to sleep on with tiny tents, no car to have to be bent double - we could stretch our legs and have soft matresses - heaven!!!!!!!!!

The evening saw us walking the streets of the historical centre of St Petersburg - to see the WInter Palace with it’s 1,056 rooms and 117 staircases - it is absolutely gigantic - no photos of ours could do it justice. Andrew worked out that if the children were to sleep in just one room per night, it would take them nearly 3 years to sleep in each of them. We focused on the historic side - visiting Peter and Paul Fortress - the oldest building in the city, walking across bridges, through a small park where still life painters were at work, looking at Nevsky Prospeckt (St Petersburg’s most famous street), the Monument to the Heroic Defenders of Leningrad, Alexander Colomn and the Admiralty, the Artillery Museum and so much more. In the back streets are smaller rivers and cafes - much what we’d imagine Venice to look like. There are huge ornately decorated buildings everywhere - no window or doorway has escaped - every window is decorated with a central motif, every entrance door pillar a set of two statues holding up their concrete shelters. Even the backs and the sides of the buildings are heavily decorated, many with several statues of somethng or other lining the roof tops - the banks of the main River Neva are completely covered everywhere with such. The main shopping streets or Prospekts as they are more commonly known are similarly attired. Then there are the huge monuments and churches which stand out in their own right and when you get bored of these, there are the plentiful beautiful parks and museums.

Thunder and lightning struck in the evening while we were out and it rained heavily but it took the blistering heat out of the evening and gave us the burst of energy we were looking for. We got quite wet as did most of St Petersburg out roaming in tshirts and shorts but none of us minded - it made a welcome change. At 10.30pm on our way back to the hotel, a large firework display on the River Neva completed our evening. We eventually made it back to the hotel at around 11pm only to be greeted and invited for vodka and to share food by a family of Ukrainians visiting and staying at the hotel for 5 days. We showed them and the hotel staff our map and when they realised we had visited the Ukraine also and that we had driven all the way from the UK - that was it - the vehicle was thoroughly inspected and the chatter and vodka ensued until the early hours. We were invited for breakfast at 10am (we woke about one minute to ten! - Andrew was pushed out of the hotel room door with the kids while Anne quickly showered - we’d just made it!), photos were taken, details of our website provided and we were given best wishes for a safe journey and a great send off. Despite language differences - the power of communication is an amazing thing.

Novgorod

En-route to Moscow - on the right motorway this time, we did a small detour to Novgorod as it wasn’t too much off our route. Novgorod grew to become one of the most important political and cultural centres in the Northwest and is home to one of Russia’s oldest Kremlin’s, first built in the 9th century. It has the very pretty Volkhov river running through it . Novgorod was very tranquil, pretty and easy to navigate - a relief after the madness of St Petersburg. We had lunch in a nice cafe-restaurant which was reasonably priced and had a walk around, deliberating whether to stay the night or not. We discussed with the children about what a kremlin traditionally was and it’s original purpose in Russia. After looking around for a while, while we liked the location, we decided not to stay. We needed to rough it if we were to be able to try to afford the famously expensive Moscow city which was next on our list.

Limos are Nemos, Kremlins are Gremlins and Lenins are McCartneys

We played a game with Jessica and AJ on the streets of St Petersburg and Novgorod - ie the first one to see s particular thing had to shout out the name. We saw so many expensive cars in St Petersburg - limousines, hummers and huge range rovers - that they’re nicknames became “Nemo”. In Novgorod we saw our first Kremlin and decided to rename it a “Gremlin” (though AJ preferred to call it a “criminal” - don’t ask us why - we think he’d mis-heard us!). We’ve seen bucket loads of Lenin statues throughout our travels in Eastern Europe as well as Russia - so these are now “McCartneys”…………… Who needs T.V.?……………

Diary (Blog)