The Pan-Eurasian Bike Trip

Much like trying to write in your journal about a day that is over a week ago (something that I am a repeat offender at, in fact i am right now about 7 days behind) it is difficult to write about the last few days before we reached Moscow with sincerity while sitting in a Starbucks thinking about how it has been a week since I last saw my friend Sabaka (my bike).  We have spent a week melting into obscurity here in Moscow, something we needed, a place big enough where finally your language doesn't distinguish you. You can walk down the street here and listen to English almost endlessly even in southern accents "Oh I think Bobby-Sue is still looking for that Mah-Trushka doll or whatever they are called. Have you seen Billy?"
"Oh yeah I think he went to get a drink with Russel, lord only knows why, they could drink on the street like these Russians, everywhere I look there is a beer."
For us it is a little bit of heaven, sure we are no longer the "major celebrities" we were in the Russian Far East, but sometimes the endless bike trip questions get tiresome, here no one even thinks it strange to see a couple of American guys walking around, we are just a couple of tourists, boy is it sweet.  At the hostel we do talk about it, but abstractly, it is something far away from us, more likely we talk about where we have been that day or how creepy Lenin's waxy hands are.
But all this is the easy life, before this about a week ago we were making some hard decisions.

Leaving Kazan was a tough moment, we had a wondrously cheap place to stay, and a beautiful and interesting city, the Mosques matched with the Orthodox Churches on the skyline had us spell bound, Eastern European and Russian city centers can often give that "fairy tale" feel, but Kazan may have taken the prize for us.
We were able to pull ourselves away, as we got out on the road it was apparent what we would be suffering from for the next few days, the pre-Moscow blues, we had them in the final days of the off-road and we were beginning to see we would have them again now.  A feeling of already being in Moscow, and not really wanting to do the riding to make it there was setting in.  I wouldn't call it being sick of riding, it is more that a certain stretch of road in your mind is already done, you have made it to Moscow, you are ready to start thinking about heading out of Russia, the only problem is that you are still 400km from Moscow.  The road itself has of course undergone a new change, they mow the grass on the side of the road, the road seems more or less to be regularly maintained (I even saw two guys washing the reflectors on the side of the road, something i can only classify as a tremendous waste of time and money).  The pavement had improved, I imagine if you are going by car from Vladivostok to Moscow, this the the point that you have been waiting for, granted there is finally what one might call traffic, so you have to be more aware of that, but for the most part it is smooth sailing. 
For those of us on bicycles it is perhaps the most challenging yet. When the local Russian government decided to improve the quality of road as it approached Moscow they obviously had to cut something, they cut the shoulder, our road.  The whole way to Nizhniy Novgorod, 400km, the shoulder was gone replaced by a soft sand (i.e. unriddable) breakdown lane.  Our lane now consisted of the white line.   The traffic was now thundering by, trucks barreling by on both sides of this narrow road, it was so narrow that at times I would look back and see that Levi had a line of cars and trucks behind him waiting for a gap in oncoming traffic to pass him (a little sweet revenge on the cars that usually have no shame or pretensions of passing us at 120km an hour).  But overall it was a three day ride that left us with little pleasure.  At one point Levi got a flat right after a stop, I was only a few meters ahead of him, but I couldn't hear him because of the traffic, to double the problem, he realized he had no good spare tubes and had let his cell phone run out of minutes (our usual way of communicating).  The result was that 30km down the road when I stopped, I waited around for a while until a car came by and informed me that my friend was broken down on the side of the road, I started riding back after I sent a text to him saying it might be time to start hitching since the sun was going down.  Levi meanwhile was already trying to hitch, with little success, despite the number of cars, finally a cop stopped, "uh oh" Levi thought "Am I finally going to get bribed?"
Instead the cop listened to his story, and realizing that the bike wouldn't fit in the cop car, waved over the first truck that he saw, and forced him to drive Levi the 25km to meet me.  The truck driver was more than happy, he had initially feared a normal random stop which usually results in the paying of a bribe, so just having to throw Levi's bike in the back was no problem.  By the final day we were both suffering, Levi was feeling quite ill from all the exhaust  and riding with earplugs for the traffic noise, and we were both tight in the shoulders from trying to ride the white line so perfectly.  We reached the beautiful city of Nizhniy Novgorod still facing another 3 or 4 day ride to Moscow which promised to be probably just as tough, with more traffic and perhaps the same amount of road.  It was wimp out time.  Call it what you like but we call it a smart decision (particularly after I witnessed a girl getting hit by a car downtown later that day, disturbing) we decided to take the train into Moscow and back out to continue our bike trip and avoid an unnecessary risk and discomfort.  It also solved the Pre Moscow blues by starting our vacation 3 days early.  Since then we spent 2 days in Nizhniy Novgorod checking out the beautiful Kremlin and getting our bicycles into working order.  We took the train to Moscow, stuffing our bikes and ourselves into a sleeper carriage was an amazing feat but we did do it.  The only thing that we have accomplished since then besides catching up on our sleep is planning our exit from Russia (apparently you can only exit by bicycle at certain border points, so we had to look one up) and talking about how exciting the next stretch of the trip should be, riding Moscow to Prague with little stopping, we need another long ride, we are sick of stopping at cities every few days, we are just going to get out and watch the pavement move and the countries change before our eyes, hopefully we will get a shoulder.
oh and next stop Ukraine, wish us luck at the border.
ellski