The Pan-Eurasian Bike Trip

When the Fat Family in a Fiat (as my mom called our early family vacations) got together, things were not always successful, Western Europe is supposed to be easy, but travel always has it's difficulties.  There was Navarro, a small town in France, where we spent 4 hours driving around trying to leave but every sequence of roads we took brought us back to the center.   I was little and quite appropriately asked "are we going to die out here?".  Or there was the time we were trying to climb Mount Vesuvius and the road slowly kept getting smaller and smaller, but no one wanted to acknowledge that we might be on the wrong road so we sat in silence until the road turned to a mud path and the branches were scratching the side of the car.  Then there was the time we went to Cinque Terre, 5 small Italian towns only connected by train and hiking paths, very beautiful and scenic.  We decided to take the path when we arrived in late afternoon since it said it was only 30 minutes.  It took 2 hours hiking along a cliff, in some places the path had been narrowed because part of it had fallen in the sea below, we were passing all these Italian families who had also made the mistake, the grandmothers in their fur jackets and fancy Italian shoes splashing along the muddy path (did I mention it had rained recently). We arrived in the next town and Keith and I took some "extreme swigs" as we called it of water because of course we hadn't planned on a two hour hike. We would also spend hours looking for affordable hotels, cruising through several towns sometimes well into the night.  But all this was my parents fault of course, I have a much better sense of direction and after riding a bike through Asia, this should be no problem, right? About an hour after leaving Prague, we discovered that the bike path would be most of the time just that, a dirt track.  If we were lucky it might be a big cobblestone cart path (ever ridden a fully loaded road bike over huge uneven cobblestones?). But it wasn't too bad, when the road was nice it was very flat and quick. We continued to ride along it for a couple of days to Germany, it was beautiful, riding along the Elbe river between the mountains, amazing hill top castles, really great riding.  The weather was pretty good, the leaves are changing on the trees so it is cold, but there wasn't too much rain. The day we entered Germany, the weather was great, we even had a tailwind and the road was nice, we did the first 20km quickly and easily the area was getting remote and it looked on the map like the towns along the river were only connected by the train and bike paths, strange.... As I struggled to push my bike up the muddy rocky path along the cliff , I glanced back down the path I had come, isn't this thing supposed to be downhill? I stumbled to the rest area at the highpoint in the path and looked down, there was the path I was obviously supposed to take, it was along the rivers edge and looked like a total mud pit. "Oh looks like I chose the good way!" As I carried my bike down a flight of muddy stairs and bashed my leg into the pedal for the 400th time in an hour I reconsidered which might have been the best choice. At least down there I wouldn't be passed by all these bewildered hikers watching a man carry a fully loaded bicycle down a fully staired hiking trail.  I texted Levi and asked if he had made the same mistake, he responded "I just tore my waterproof pants with my pedal while carrying my bike down a flight of stairs, unless the other path features stairs as well I think I took the same one?" To be fair to Germany, the same thing happened to me in Czech, I tore my rain pants carrying my bike up a set of stairs onto and oil pipeline bridge that the Czech Republic uses for a bicycle crossing. For the rest of the trail all I could think about was Cinque Terre and being caught for a second time on a touristy hiking path screaming and yelling inappropriately with a huge fully loaded bicycle (My friend Nate and I went bike-hiking by accident in Yellowstone too).  We made good time again after the bike hike and once again we began to think it was a fluke incident and the bike trail was overall good.  We got lost outside of a small town about 2 hours later, slowly the road got narrower and narrower until it just stopped in the middle of a muddy field. Backtracking in a car isn't the end of the world in a car, but on a bike it is pretty frustrating, we lost hope for the bike path.   We made it to Dresden and decided to get back on the road from there on(coincidentally the big mountains happened to have just ended, lucky us).  We made better time, but things were different, since Poland we had started to see bike paths fairly regularly, in the towns, sometimes even out on roads. We often stayed with the road because it is much quicker and is always pavement as opposed to uneven bricks.  But in Germany the bike paths were everywhere, and there were rules, we've been corralled, the cars now honk if you aren't on the bike path, you have your own lights that you have to obey, there are cyclists everywhere, big, small, slow, fast.  We began to feel cramped, you seem always be stuck behind someone or facing imminent tragedy as a large family all ages and all on bikes comes barreling in slow motion towards you, you have to ride on the grass to avoid maming a toddler swerving on a tricycle.  So sometimes we stuck with the road.  Then we got pulled over.  We had found that what often happened with the roads we were following was that they would have bike paths almost all the time and then when they intersected with another big road  or city, the bike paths would disappear and reappear about 2km down the road after the intersection. We knew that this was probably a hint to find another way through the town, but we weren't about to go get lost when it is only two km on a nice shouldered road.  Usually nothing happened, a couple of honks and we were off again, this time however a cop passed me and put his lights on, he pulled over to the side of the road and I guess we were "pulled over." He took our passports instead of drivers licences.  After waiting a ridiculously long time (it was just like being in a car)  he handed us back our passports and said what I believe were his only English words "highway! No Bike!".  I was lucky enough to be pulled over again without Levi a little while down the road.  This time they ignored my lack of German and lectured me for about 5 minutes, then escorted me with lights flashing, into the town, they were about to leave when one of the guys saw my toy machine gun that I have on my backpack it is just a little fake gun that makes a ratta-tat-tat noise when you pull the big red nob on it.  The German police officer decided that this was too much and gave me another long speech about something to do with the gun, then made me hide it (great now I can get charged for a concealed fake weapon too!).  They left and I spent 20 minutes trying to get back to the road. I would have been pretty angry and frustrated,  but luckily we were on our way to meet my friend from Hamburg, Arne that evening, so I was feeling pretty jolly.  Arne met us about 100km from the city in a hostel and we all rode in the next day.  It was great to have someone ride with us and let them in on the whole experience. Arne even got a good day with 3 flat tires to set us back.     We spent 4 days in Hamburg, Arne brought us to see the loading docks, Hamburg is an inlet of the North Sea,  Levi and I both look at each other and say "North Sea!!!! What the hell are we doing up here!?!? We have GOT to get south." So we headed towards Holland, a small step south.  We had mastered the system of navigating only bike accessible roads thanks to a day of riding with Arne.  We rode like we hadn't a care in the world, we had the names and addresses of two hostels for the next two days, and besides that nothing planned except to be in the south of France in December.  The terrain was now getting kind of thick with really cool normally dark forests, but now they were orange with turning leaves.  The bike path often goes off from the road into the middle of the forest, so you get the full effect.  We reached the first hostel, they are in reality kind of like summer camps that also allow guests, they are filled with little German kids on school trips.  It was fully booked, no room for us.  More and more this is the norm, no matter how remote the area, the European hotels are either full or really expensive, even on a Tuesday.  Luckily the town nearby had a hotel for a good price.  The next day we were not so lucky, we tried to find a reasonable hotel for hours, we wound up sailing through the dark (now that we have the bike path darkness is less of a threat) and the rain until about 7:30 that night (it gets dark about 5).  I just kept seeing flash backs to the trips with my folks in the car, in the rain going from hotel to hotel, somehow that seemed a lot less unpleasant while watching the rain drip from my visor.  The place we found wasn't even cheap, it was just acceptable in a downpour.  Since then this has become our new battle, trying to find a reasonable hotel each day without having to ride far out of the way or at night. We now try and get book hostels a day in advance and try and make the distance each day.  Of course that is all just water under the bridge, a day later we made it to Holland, where for some reason all my worries just seem to melt away, must be something in the coffee...where is that waitress. ellski

The weather forecast was right, the morning we left Krakow the rain was freezing and slush was thick in the street.  Even before we left the hostel there were signs that this was going to be once again a trying section of the trip.  I had, as usual tried to lighten the load a bit before another push, books, receipts and such get cleared out of my bags. This time I had decided that the pepper spray days were over, so not even thinking I left it in the middle of the table, innocently thinking that everyone would know it was pepper spray even though it was in Cyrillic.  We aren't really sure what happened, but the theory is that someone looked at the spray can said "I wonder if this is perfume?" and sprayed it in the air, because a few minutes later we were all coughing and choking trying to escape the hostel as quickly as possible, an alternative theory is that someone was trying to gas the hostel because they found the staff there as rude as we did.
Our love affair with Poland started to fall apart as fast as the freezing rain from the sky, it wasn't that we didn't like it, it was just making us nauseous.  As soon as the temperature dropped everyone turned on their heat, which apparently is entirely coal powered, every chimney was spewing black coal smoke and it was choking us as we road (luckily the thick cloud cover kept the smoke in) after about 3 hours of riding we were positively sick.  We quit after just 60km, which really wasn't to disappointing considering the weather, we had a nice leisurely evening trying to decipher Polish news programs (my favorite game, you never can quite tell what is going on, just get glimpses of Obama smiling and Putin looking perplexed).  We woke up the next day and packed up slowly, paying more attention to the guesthouse's dog than our packing, eventually we hopped on the bikes only to realize that when the bike mechanic in Krakow said that Levi was going to need a new bottom bracket for his bike, he wasn't talking about the distant uncertain future, he was talking about before we left the city.
Luckily for us when Kona designed it's touring bike, they thought ahead and designed it with the most advanced and cutting edge bottom bracket, only made in America, and it was a Saturday.  We went to the local bike shop in town, the owner was a great guy, a cyclist himself, but he couldn't really do anything for us.  He called all the bike shops in a 500 mile radius, and they all said we can do nothing until Monday and then we can only order the part.  It was another one of those disheartening moments, we went to the coffee shop to discuss our plans.  We no longer live our own time on this trip, it is scheduled, we are due to meet my boss Adrian Cyr on the 5th of December to bicycle the last 1100 kilometers to Porto, in St. Jean Port de Pied, and on the 25th we have to be in Hamburg to see my friend Arne while he is on vacation.  A three day delay sitting in a small Polish town is not what the bike trip needs right now, so we made the hard decision to take the train to Prague (200 miles of skipping) and visit my friend Robert for a few days and get the bike fixed then, therefore getting to see Prague at the same time as killing time. 
We walked back to the bike shop a little pissed at how things were going (luckily I encountered a large friendly basset hound on the way to cheer me up), but as soon as we entered the bike shop we got some good news, the guy thought he could fix it, it wouldn't be perfect, but it might last til Prague.  "It might last 1000 kilometers or 2" was how he put it. 

All of a sudden we were back out on the road and flying, the rain was less, the coal smoke dissipated and we were new men, it was as if we were given a second chance.  We flew along the much improved Polish roads, pedalling to our hearts content until we hit Katowice, Poland. Katowice is an industrial center of Poland, or at least was, it kind of reminded me of old textile towns like Lowell in New England, a lot of brick buildings that seem to have little going on in them.  Our arrival also coincided with the five o clock everyone get home and turn their coal furnaces on, so our impression of Katowice was not particularly charming.  We started our evening search for a hotel, which has become one of the most interesting parts of our day now, for some reason even the most remote roadside hotels and bed and breakfasts seem to be full almost every night, I am beginning to think that we might not look like the most desirable guests given our muddy and scruffy appearance.  As soon as we started looking however, our search was cut short by discovering that it was neither "1000 kilometers or 2" but instead 70.67, Levi's bottom bracket was done.  It was disheartening, particularly considering we now had to fly back into the center of Katowice in the dark and try and find the train station to go overnight to Prague.  We did successfully navigate the city to the train station, using a combination of Russian and English to get directions.  All of a sudden we were hopping on a train putting our bikes in the bicycle car (!!!!) and heading to Prague, we would be there by morning (again a small loss of 300km on the odometer). 
It is extremely weird to arrive in a city ahead of schedule, at least for us, particularly considering that we took the train and didn't "earn it" but I got over it as soon as we started walking around Prague and got one of those great street sausages.  We met up with Robert Klima, a friend of mine that I worked with at Adrian's Restaurant with.  We stayed for 3 days at his house with his wonderful family.  For us it was a very strange sensation to be around young kids, we have become somewhat uncivilized and primal in our 7 months on the road, and just to be in someones house and in someones company I think had a good effect on us.  Hopefully by the time Adrian joins us in France we will be semi normal people, or perhaps we will bring him down with us, "ever blown a snot rocket in a busy city street Adrian?"
One of the best new developments about getting to Prague was that from here on out we should be able to ride almost entirely on bike trails, from Prague to Hamburg there is a bike trail along the Elbe river, and it is supposed to be mostly downhill. A downhill, car and truck free ride to Hamburg, why didn't we just ride around Europe twice instead of crossing Russia?
We left Prague with Levi's bike fixed, our mentality somewhat more civilized and our stomachs ready to enter roadside sausage country, we rode down to the river in the center of Prague and just like that were on our way direct towards Germany, it was great, a nice wide bike path along the side of the river watching the cars climb into the mountains on either side and watching our path stay flat as plywood, everything seemed perfect as we headed into Germany, hell we might even make it in one day...
But then I forgot what my history of travelling in Europe is like
ellski

It was a short lived high entering Ukraine, the long arm of the visa police was beyond us, but the long arm of Former Soviet Republics was still alive and well in Ukraine.  There were differences, hotels were appearing in stunning regularity (and we could now check in without fear of persecution), whereas Russia was mainly a cow on the street country with the occasional passing goat, Ukraine is more of a wandering goose country (much to Levi's chagrin), with a side of meandering goats.  But overall the transition was fairly seamless, the phrase "Breadbasket of Europe" brought us a never ending flow of wind to battle, the roads still were troublingly narrow and potholed and of course there were the cafes.  The Russian roadside cafe is something that I had taken for granted as being normal by this point in the trip, my lunch of mashed potatoes, borsch, fried eggs and 4 pieces of bread seemed so standard and normal to me that I didn't even think it strange that the cafes continued without interruption in Ukraine, the menu didn't change, the customers didn't change, it was distressingly similar.  The language is extremely similar, once or twice Ukrainians even asked us where we studied Ukrainian, so we could still communicate.
We rode 2 days into Ukraine making jokes about riding against the wind, the geese and the breadbasket before one of those very same cafes struck me down again with food poisoning (apparently once you get food poisoning you are more inclined to get it for a period of some months before your stomach can fully repair, i.e. don't continue eating crappy cafe food.) Luckily we happened to be staying at a hotel wifi and the Ukrainian version of HBO, so I suffered only moderately (not to mention I am now a food poisoning pro).
We were back on the road 2 days later once again battling some of the worst headwinds of the trip, the first day back I might consider one of my lowest days of the trip, throwing a continual exhausted hissy fit against the wind, luckily by the next day my strength and sanity had at least partially returned to me in time for Kiev. It was my second time in Kiev, I went once for spring break during my semester in St. Petersburg, it was more medieval and European than I remembered it, based on several hills, the streets twist and turn in between many lovely Russ-err Ukrainian Churches (I guess hills become a lot more obvious on a bicycle).  But we were in a rush, as leaves were beginning to collect on the ground, we spent just one night in Kiev before getting back out on the road for Lvov and Krakow.  This stretch proved to be one of the most difficult for Levi, and at his expense one of the more amusing for me.  It started the first day out of Kiev, when after seeing roadside babushkas selling fruit and vegetables since Vladivostok, Levi finally decided to stop and buy some pears. "You know Levi that on this entire trip you could not have chosen a spot closer to Chernobyl than we are now, it is barely 100 miles away."
"Oh god dammit, and these pears looked so good!!" He exclaimed as he put them down. 
The next day he left his prized peanut butter and honey sitting on a cafe table, which is only funny if you know how paranoid Levi is about leaving things, he checks everywhere to make sure nothing is left behind, and a peanut butter loss is big on a European bike trip.
He hit his low point the next day when he accidentally put his knee to our laptop monitor, not breaking it, just making it resemble a broken mirror, making surfing the web (we have finally gotten to a region where wireless internet is commonly available) an amusing experience. 
All this combined with some rough headwinds and difficult navigation days (cities are becoming a big problem to get through quickly) led Levi and I back to a term we hadn't used since we were in Santiago together suffering from arguably the worst hangover of our lives, we tried to "buy it off".  We spent the second 3 days to Lvov, stopping at every roadside babushka selling wares looking for cheap gifts and small comforts (simply a new pair of wool socks alone can "buy off" a weeks worth of headwind gloom).
Lvov was not only a great stop, it was our last stop in Ukraine, it was perhaps not a great stop as you might expect: magnificent architecture, wonderful food, a great touristic experience, instead it was of course a great bike trip stop: the television had music videos, the Internet cafe was fast and nearby, there was a french fry stand outside the hotel and we got our laundry washed AND DRIED (that has never happened before) for under 8 dollars, oh and I got a patch kit for tubes at a terrific deal.
The morning we left Lvov we were all set with clean laundry, freshly patched tubes and stomachs full of greasy fries, everything you need for a border crossing.  Amusingly enough, just as we were leaving Ukraine, we stopped at one last gas station (a nice one, a chain with a store and mini restaurant), one of the attendants offered us a shot of vodka, we declined, but happened to catch him swigging one down none the less on his way to fill up someones car.  Goodbye Ukraine!!
Or not, it turned out that the border crossing we had chosen was of course one which only can be crossed by car! We had to sit on the side of the road hitching trying to get someone to drive us across with the bikes. Luckily "Tony" as we dubbed him was the man for the job, a Ukranian builder with a van who was going (I think) to load up on building supplies from Poland, he showed us his passport, and it was obvious he was an old border pro, I had never seen so many stamps in my life, he knew all the guards by their first names and thankfully was on great terms with them.  I say thankfully because, you're going to like this, it turned out that there were some problems.
"yest bolshoi problema, no c menya, neechivo" (you have big problem but with me it is no problem)
"Shto eta problema?" (What's the problem?) we asked
"Vash visa, tolka tranzit, piyat dien" (your visa, only transit, 5 days)
YOU MEAN WE OVERSTAYED OUR VISA AGAIN?????? "SON OF A *%$#*, GOD@%$#^ WHAT THE *&^%^!!!!!
Apparently when we told the Ukrainian border guards that we were to be biking to Poland they thought we could cover the, oh say nearly 1000 miles in about 5 days, no problem and gave us a transit visa. Luckily we had Tony, he had gone to high school with the immigration official, so no night in jail for "The Idiots" (really earning that one) this time, just sailed right through on the wings of Tony our Ukrainian savior.  All of a sudden we were seeing blue with gold stars swirling all around us, we were in the European Union!!!!!!!!!!

Poland hit us like a ton of bricks, when I told people I was going to Poland, everyone seemed to think of it as a very poor country, or at least referenced it as "one of the poorest countries in the EU", which I guess for us is akin to "one of the poorest families in Greenwich".  Tony guided us to a local cheap hotel that he frequented (we rode behind the car) and rented us a room, as we don't speak polish (we have since just kind of been switching between Russian and English, much to the amusement of the locals).  We went to a supermarket and were blown away, sure Russia and Ukraine have supermarkets, but not like this, the colors, the products, the prices, it was like we had died and gone to food heaven.  We tried to play it down in our minds, perhaps it was just this one town that looked like I could be riding through the Netherlands or France, or this one supermarket that featured a wondrous collection of foods.
It wasn't though, the next day it was pouring rain all day for the first time since the beginning of the trip, but we hardly noticed we were to busy observing the hotels and restaurants on the side of the road, you could just stop the bike in a small town and get a slice of pizza, the towns had bike lanes and stop lights, signs were correct in their kilometers and directions. It was too much I think Levi and I fell immediately into culture shock.  As Levi put it, for so long there had been a special formula of doing things, it had become the equivalent of home, but now it was gone, we didn't know the language and we didn't understand what was going on. 
We of course had to take a hotel as the rain was pretty intense, Levi kept going into hotels and coming out "alright there are two prices, I am assuming that one price is without hot water" I went into the next hotel "Oh I get it, it isn't hot water, it is probably with or without bathroom." It turned out we had come farther than we had thought, "It is with or without breakfast" the hotel attendant told me. Surreal.  We went with the breakfast.
Poland was a cure to a sickness we didn't even know we had, we did another day of riding in solid rain to Krakow, but rain is a lot less worrisome when you know that a bed is never more than a km away, and a good meal that isn't Russian cafe food is only a momentary decision away. The bike trip now seems to promise to be more similar to riding your bike across the US, something that initially we might not have been as appreciative of as we are now, without Russia and Ukraine this email would have been solely about headwinds and how all-day rain permeates your mind, instead it is about joy we are feeling about some seemingly small and insignificant changes that to us are like opening a door to a five star suite. But don't worry things are bound to get rough again, if you want a preview just type in Krakow Poland to weather.com  or better yet here is tonight's forecast:
Periods of snow.
Low 32F. Winds NNW at 10 to 20 mph.
Chance of snow 80%.
2 to 4 inches of snow expected.
No body said it would be easy.
ellski

Leaving Moscow was refreshing, although we were both struggling with colds, we were excited to be back on the road and looking at Ukraine as our next destination.  As soon as we hit the outskirts of Moscow, we knew things had changed, it was officially fall, the trees were yellowing and the streets filled with fallen leaves and babushkas gathering them.  Over the first few days out we quickly realized why so many books begin with the phrase "It was a windy fall day" but luckily we no longer really care, we have cut our riding back and only do about 100km a day so even in the wind it is not too bad.  This section was the determined section, our eyes fixed on the road in front of us as if we could see Ukraine getting closer.  It was fascinating to be riding out of Moscow through Western Russia, a place that you can't help but look around and think of both Hitler's and Napoleon's Armies being beaten back slowly along the roads, the war memorials have a little more significance on this side of the Volga. 

After two days we came upon Yasnaya Polonaya, the estate of Tolstoy, it was very beautiful, rolling hills, birch forests, wonderful rivers all at the height of fall.  We went to see his grave, which is a simple grass mound in a secluded corner of the estate, very cool.  We camped just outside the grounds of his estate and got to watch one of our last Russian Sunsets. 
 We were almost beginning to get nostalgic about leaving Russia, until the next day arrived and the roads once again disintegrated into a shoulderless, maniacal highway with more potholes than road.  I spent the day thinking in my head about how for my next post I wouldn't even write a summary of our trip out of Russia, instead I would write "Russia. A Retrospective"  finally not pulling any punches, letting the Russians know that their "roads" were an insult to the word.  However 2 days later we arrived in Kursk, where the Germans and the Russians fought the biggest tank battle of WWII, and events took a different turn, I was forced yet again to write a summary of our trip out of Russia. 

It started better than any city I can remember, the roads were smooth, the traffic light, and the tank Memorials wonderful, I immediately took a shine to Kursk, and was happy to be spending a night in a hotel downtown.  I had always said to Levi before we started this trip, that we would be crossing so many towns that eventually we would hit a few on their name day, but so far we had missed every one, we missed Moscow by just a few days.  But on entering Kursk we found out that we had finally hit one, everyone walking around in silly hats and wigs, little carnivals taking place on every street corner. "Let's get to the hotel and get out their, I want a corndog and some cotton candy"
"I can't wait to get one of those cheesy American Cowboy hats and a plastic saber!"
It was going to be one of those great evenings on the bike trip, you had just ridden 130km and it had made you kind of giddy and excited to see a town and a fair.
We walked into the Centralnaya hotel, an old but refurbished Soviet hotel, (the kind we usually try and avoid because their bedding is always geared towards a person of 5 foot 1)  Levi handed the woman his passport because he is the only one who still has his immigration card (it is a small piece of paper that they give you on entering the country, which you must keep with you the whole time, a hotel back around Baikal lost mine, so I have been going without it).  The woman filled out the first 5 minutes of paperwork (god I hate old Soviet hotels) and looked at me "passport?"
"Sure" And I handed it over, Levi and I looked at each other "here we go again" For some reason it is only the Soviet hotels that even care about the immigration card, no one else even looks at it.
"Where is you Immigration card?"
"I don't have one, a hotel lost it"
"Well you can't stay here, I can't let you."
"We have ridden our bikes from Vladivostok, I didn't lose my immigration card, a hotel did, I have a passport, I have a visa, please let us stay."
This is usually when the woman capitulates and says she can make an exception. "Sit down" She says.
Levi and I smile at each other, works every time.  A few minutes go by, we sit joking about the situation and our last night in Russia.
"Cops will probably be here in a minute" I joke
"Man I can't believe that tomorrow we will just be out of Russia, just like that."
Now it must be mentioned that we had a bit of a problem to face at the border, our visas, although 1 year in duration only allowed you to be in the country 3 months at a time, every 90 days you had to leave the country for 90 days.  This was a brand new rule that the Russians had introduced I guess to be more like the US.  We had asked the Russian Consulate, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the company who had sponsored our visa about the new rule and whether we would get in trouble, they all said no, our sponsor gave us the great quote "Don't try and follow all the rules in Russia boys, it is impossible."  Since our entrance we had received some warnings that we might have to pay a bribe or get fined, we could even face a five year ban from Russia, all this we have joked about for quite some time.
Finally a man appeared, he seemed to be the manager, him and the woman both expressed astonishment that we had gone the whole way across Russia (Kursk is 55 miles from the border) without running into trouble because of the lack of Immigration card.
"We can let you stay here tonight, but would you like an immigration card? You won't be able to leave Russia without one."
I was not really very worried about getting a new card, generally Russians are more afraid of their bureaucracy than is warranted, but this guy seemed nice and I figured it wouldn't take very long.
"Sure, why not"
I believe that it was just about this time that the first set of police officers arrived on the scene, and the Kursk Day Fireworks started (set to Tchaikovsky). The cops seemed to be in a good mood, but we were beginning to fade, we had ridden 130km and had sat in a hotel lobby for over an hour and a half, we were tired and wanted to go to bed (at this point I was willing to forgo the corndog, begrudgingly) The two officers were really not to be missed, we watched them with much amusement while they commented about the beauty of the American Passports, had a good chuckle at the thought of two Americans riding bikes across Russia.  From time to time other Police Lieutenants passed through the lobby in packs apparently having rented "Party Rooms"(It was a holiday after all, and Russians have the incredible ability to continue partying in the exact style and manner you remember partying as a teenager even in old age)  "our" officers would hail them over and let them in on the joke, roars of laughter would erupt.
"Well on the bright side we are getting our problems out of the way tonight, tomorrow we will be able to just cruise through the border." 
Suddenly we heard words that made us break out into a cold sweat, "90 out of 180 days"
"Oh Shit they figured it out"
"Why haven't you left Russia? Your visa says you must leave every 3 months."
"well we wanted to ride bikes across, and it took longer than we thought."
"How long"
"Seven Months"
"BAHAHAHAHAHA" They broke out again in jovial laughter. 
"Well maybe I imagine they will call their buddies at the border and tell them we are on our way tomorrow and just wave us through."
Indeed the manager came over, he spoke a little bit of English and he told us "they are calling the Border, what time do you think you will be there tomorrow?" Nothing could be better, it was really like a dream.
"4 or 5" We said, glowing with excitement.
By now the police officers were on the paperwork point of the investigation, everyone had to be a witness, the guard, the woman behind the desk.  Two new men had arrived as well, no uniform, I assumed they were just from another type of Police force, as Russia seems to have all different levels of cops and all with different types of forms to fill out.  It turned out they were from immigration.  The two new guys could hardly get their investigation  underway because they had to stop every three and a half minutes to smoke cigarettes, the lead officer reminded me of an character out of a bad Sylvester Stallone film, the guy who wanted to be a real cop but had failed and  now took his current job way to seriously, he had a huge mustache and was constantly struggling to come off as friendly.  The other guy was young and seemed to be more interested in the bike trip than anything else. 
"Why didn't you leave after 90 days" The old man asked us in an unfriendly tone.
We explained again, he seemed unimpressed.  We were still in the lobby of the hotel, by now the police officers were on the stamping level of their interrogation (most of them seem to carry a rubber stamp in a holster by their gun for easy paperworking), but we seemed no closer to getting into our room.  It had been 4 hours.  All of a sudden Maigret, as we took to calling the old man summoned us "grab your stuff and follow me."
He led us out to his small hatchback which we proceeded to jam all of our belongings in. He drove us directly to the police station.  We haven't been major celebrities since the Far East of Russia, where they rarely see Americans, the same principal applied here, I think we might have been the first Americans in the Kursk Police Station.  Everyone wanted to know what we were in for, we spent about 40 minutes waiting around for the interpreter to be woken up (it was now midnight) which gave us plenty of time to bask in our glory and answer questions from our fans (on duty police officers and teenagers caught for underage drinking) no one could believe that Maigret had pulled to guys who had bicycled across Russia into the Police station.  We still felt pretty confident that this would result in our being fined and everything being alright, we weren't spies, we weren't terrorists, we were simply cyclists.  Plus one of the officers on duty had a sister who lived in Maine!!!  Eventually the translator arrived, from the moment I met him I knew he was on our side, he seemed to feel genuinely bad for our current situation. Quickly  they read us the Russian version of Rights "Are we under arrest?" I asked (It is a phrase that looks good in books and sounds good on television, but turns your stomach when you actually have to use it.)
"Oh no, they just want your statements" answered the interpreter.

 Maigret then wrote down our side of the story with the aid of the interpreter, which I though I gave pretty well, we had asked everyone we could about the visa problem before we left, everyone said it wouldn't be a big deal including the Ministry of Foreign affairs and the Consulate in New York.  We got business visas because they were the only ones that lasted a year and again that was what the consulate said to do. I lost my immigration card at a hotel.  We asked at the American Embassy in Moscow about any troubles we would have and they said it was too late to do anything about it and that we would probably just pay a fine and maybe face a ban from Russia.  But as everyone knows cops have an amazing ability to twist ones words. We chose to ignore the visa regulations, we got business visas even though we were travelling for tourism, I lost my immigration card but chose not to make any attempt to get a new one, and we ignored the warnings of the American Embassy and continued on riding.  Right, exactly.  We ironed out some of the details needless to say before we signed anything, by now the paper count was probably one whole tree. 
We asked the interpreter "So what do you think is going to happen to us? A fine?" still assuming we would be out of this after the last stamp dried.
"Oh well tonight you stay here and tomorrow you go to court." I think at that moment an actual jail cell door slammed, or perhaps it was my imagination.
Things closed up for the night pretty quickly after that, we did our best to sound friendly when we said see you tomorrow to the two immigration officers.  Suddenly it was just us, a bunch of drunk teenagers and the officer with a sister in Maine.  He informed Levi that he couldn't have his glasses for the night, he did however allow us our waters and jackets.  We were given a opportunity to use the bathroom, which made me wish for the outhouses of Siberia, I guess Levi got off easy because he couldn't see, then we were put in a room with another guy, 3 guys, 3 eight inch wide benches and a bright light.  All things considered I think we both slept fairly well, the key for jail sleeping is to either be blackout drunk (as the man next to us was judging by the black eye and severe scratches that screamed I fell on the ground tonight) or have ridden 130km and stayed up half the night answering questions in a foreign language.

I woke up around 7 to the sound of the other guy pacing the room, probably trying to put the pieces of the night back together.  Eventually 9am came and we were let out.  Levi got his glasses back and we headed up to meet a police sergeant, the police of course had to make a report as to why we spent a night in their cell, he might have been the least friendly and most frustrated of everyone, we absolutely could not communicate, and to make matters worse, the immigration officers had taken our passports which has everything about us written in Russian.  We spent about a half our with this guy yelling at us and accomplishing little more than our name and addresses, we were shockingly happy to see Maigret open the door and whisk us away. Not before we took our first mug shot though, a moment I could not help laugh at and wish I could get them for www.paneurasianbiketrip.com, it would make a good opening page.
We gathered up all of our stuff and got in a van.  Finally we were allowed to eat some of the food we had bought the night before, we tore into our baguettes and cheese, regretting having not bought more, but it brought us back from the edge of delirium.  Soon we found ourselves inside the Kursk Immigration office, where these two men accomplished virtually nothing for about 4 hours other than taking our case file from maybe 60 pages to maybe over 250, we were fingerprinted as well, and there were about 10 copies of those floating around by the end. Finally around 2 we found ourselves outside of the courtroom, with our translator back by our side.  In the mean time we had somewhat struck up a friendship with the younger immigration officer, we now took up the opportunity to ask through the interpreter: "What do you think will happen to us?"
The guy sighed, a bad sign.
"Oh he is quite sure you will be deported."
"Deported?"
"Yes, the judge could take another decision, but it seems that you will probably be sent back through Moscow and sent back to the United States."
Disbelief is all that could describe the Idiots faces at that point.
"So it is over, we are going home."
We sat their joking around as only one could in a situation like this,  "well I guess I'll be getting that Cappo sooner than I thought."
"Can I get deported to a country other than the US?"
Talking to the translator calmed us as we waited for Maigret to get through with his meeting with the judge, he came out angry and took off in the van. 
"What is going on now?"
"Apparently in order to deport you they need all the paperwork in English as well as Russian, because you don't speak Russian. So now he is going to a meeting with his boss to see if they can just let you off with a fine, which in my opinion is what they should have done last night."
Finally Maigret came back, said something to his younger partner, and the partner in the few words of English he knew said "Welcome to Ukraine!!!"
Finally not knowing a language pays off, if we had known more Russian we would be in Moscow in a detaining cell (apparently deportation can take up to 3 months).  However we still had to spend another 2 hours getting our fines (more paperwork).  It was 5 o'clock before Maigret was closing the van door on us and saying "okay go to the nearest bank and pay this fine and then get out of the country, next time don't break the rules."
We looked around, it was getting dark and all the banks had closed, it was Saturday night, how the hell were we going to pay this fine and get out of the country?  We figured they would let us wait, we would just lay low.  We tried to get a hotel room in town, but everyone knew about us, no one would let the convicts stay, we were exhausted and delirious and now we were going to have to ride out of the city.  One woman started shouting at us that it was only 3 hours to the Ukrainian Border just go and ride it, get out of Kursk, we had come a long way since the Russian Far East. 
We rode out of town, we found a hotel on the side of the road, as usual, they didn't ask about my immigration card (I still didn't have one), we took showers to wash the guilt of jail off, and slept like innocent babies.
We spent another day riding to the border, camping in the town before it and in the morning going to the bank to pay the fine, finally we were legal.  We rode to the border, they looked at our fines and certificates of payment like they were three headed dragons, it was clear if we had just made it 55 miles further these guys would have laughed us through the border.  Oh and my lost Immigration card? one of the guys at the border handed me a knew one and told me to fill it out, then decided it was easier to fill it out himself. Appropriately enough according to Russia Ellery Althaus Born 01/27/83 entered Russia on the 26th of January 2009, Pol Althaus, born 03/25/88 left Russia on 28th of September 2009
Polski

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

When Levi, Nate and I  were planning the walk across Spain about 3 years ago, according to Levi I one day said "yeah we will get this one done and it will be in a the box, we won't have to worry about it" which since then has taken on a rather Al Gore "lock box" style parody.  We always picture our different adventures (they are only ones that Levi and I have done together) in the box bragging to each other, The Camino is always drunk and bragging how "you've never met anyone better" and Mexico is always throwing itself around to crazy reggaeton music covered in sunburns because it was too cheap to buy sunscreen.  This trip so far hasn't had anything to go into the "box" yet, we hadn't conquered anything, just three quarters of Russia, but we all know you can't throw three quarters of Russia into the "box", it will be eaten alive by the Camino "What you weren't tough enough to ride the whole thing? I told you you'd never met anyone better!"
We woke up early on the 24th of August, knowing that we were finally going to put one in the box, Asia, a big one.  It was kind of like starting the bike trip over again, sure the odometer wasn't at straight zeros, but we were well rested and once again unsure of what to expect, would Europe be full of drive up windows, round abouts and fancy wine bars? Or would things basically stay the same, after all things had been getting more and more filled with life as we have been going west, I just imagine that the roads might get a bit smoother, the cafes a bit closer and rotaries more traditional (we have seen some of the world's most impressive rotary designs here in Russia, there have been several figure eight death traps, many with stop lights and intersections worked into them, as a cyclist it is terrifying I can't even imagine what it is like in a car).  We rode out with the Yekaterinburg Cycle Club and even a couple of television stations trying to catch some action shots, as we excitedly spun our legs towards Europe, I even took out the video camera as we rode and of course the ego's showed themselves to be alive and well even after 4 months of subtle setbacks in Asia. When we reached the marker, just 17 k out of the city your first thought was that the Russians had literally just drawn a line where they figured it would be easiest to put a cafe and souvenir shop, it wasn't at the top of some great mountain as we imagined, it is just a spot in the forest, although on closer inspection it turns out that it is a watershed boundary.  We stopped at the boundary and posed for the cameras, said good by to Asia, and our cycling companions, and turned and looked into Europe,  "Funny, they have birch trees and mosquitos here too!, wonder if this side of Russia has a drinking problem too?"

In a way things did change too, we cruised in a way that was just liberating the first day, some days on the bike you just feel like even if you stopped pedalling the bike would keep going for miles, the days to Perm where days like that, just cruising out of the remnants of the Ural mountains.  There was something about coming out of the Urals that was very European, perhaps it was just that we hadn't been in a mountain range in several months, but crusing though the villages you could believe that you were in Germany or Czech Republic, it was the first time that I allowed myself to think about the prospect of riding through Europe, it took over my thoughts instantly. I think the Perm region will forever be the closest thing to truckers we ever came to, we found a trucker magazine that listed all the truck stops in the area,  (mind you from Yekaterinburg to Perm there were 4 times as many as there were listed from Novosibirsk to Yekat a distance twice as long) and we became truck stop critics, we would ride from one stop to the next looking for the perfect place to "park our rigs" for the night, then we would roll in dirty as sin, grab a steak and some eggs and talk to the other truckers about the roads and the women.  Eventually as the truckers head to their cozy beds in the cab we, the mini truckers, head out into the backyard to pitch our homes.  The tent has really become one of my favorite places, basically because it is mine, after 6 months of travel there are only two things that are the same in our lives, the bike and the tent, everything else is in constant flux, the tent is my bedroom, and boy is it messy.

We arrived in Perm feeling good, we had not gone too far, only 3 days, and not too many k a day, 120, so we planned on staying only a day, just doing a talk at the American Corner and leaving the next day.  As soon as we walked into the dorms where we were staying and discovered that they were only 8 dollars a night and downtown, we knew it was going to be tough to pull ourselves away with just one day. 
Three days later we found ourselves heading back out onto the road, we indeed couldn't tear our selves away from Perm, staying two extra days, one taking a very nice bike tour of the city, the next spending most of the day shopping for suits (yeah you heard me correctly, how did you want us to show up in Moscow? In Spandex?).  We were now even more rested and ready to go, looking at 4 quick 150km days to Kazan, where we would not only be in Tartarstan, our first stan, but we would also reach the Volga, a river Napolean dreamed of and Hitler had nightmares about.  Reaching the Volga is certainly something that we had always dreamed, and now it was just 4 quick little days away.  Once again we cruised with our new top gear, almost fooling ourselves into believing that bike trips can be easy, doing 150km in a cool 6 hours, with times like that you can spend most of your day in a cafe just sipping instant coffee. That night we were sleeping soundly in our tents in a truck stop parking lot, suddenly something happened that I bet a lot of you at home had been counting on happening, I was awoken by the clickity clack of what for a second I mistook for perhaps a passing horse or cow, but that was just the groggyness and 4 months in deserted Siberia talking, but shortly there were voices to match and I realized it was a group of girls, they came up to the tent and started knocking, "Vwee hochiteye secks?" (do you want sex?) it turned out that these nice prostitutes came all the way to the corner of the muddy parking lot to make sure that the tired cyclists weren't interested in a wild night. We thanked them for their consideration, but politely declined their offer, funny as it would have looked to see one of these girls climbing into the tent.
We looked at the Russian truck stop a little bit differently in the morning, the long line of parked trucks looked slightly less innocent, none the less I still like sleeping at the truck stops, at least for now. 
We cruised again, things were becoming routine in such a positive way we were both brimming with enthusiasm as we knew with each day we were getting closer to Moscow, our next big goal, and that if things kept up like this the rest of the trip would be a breeze.  It was the next day, the exact moment that we entered the next state (it appears that road construction and maintanance is a state run operation, which seems to have no federal guidelines) that we hit, yes you guessed it the next section of offroad. There was no screaming and yelling, just silence and disbelief, the European offroad.  Getting back into the offroad mentality takes a little bit of time, your focus has to change places, now you must be looking for the best line through the rocks, or soft sand (this section had so much soft sand it often resembled a beach ride on the cape more than a federal highway through Russia, we did quite a bit of walking), your ears get used to tuning out the clanging of your bike as it hits rock after rock, pothole after pothole, and your breathing becomes less about in and out, and more about out as dust clouds go by and in at moments of good air, you become like a snorkeler.  And it wasn't without it's toll, by the end of the first day we had to stop to fix Levi's rack, another broken screw, and at the beginning of the second day (as soon as the off road hit we gave up on making it to Kazaan in 4 days and added a 5th "I don't care if I'm late day") my rack suffered a similar fate although we didn't have to pause for it.  It was also on the second day that Levi and I began to suffer from something that I think a lot of you didn't even know existed, we were suffering from bike-lag.


Bike-Lag: A rare but frustrating illness similar to Jet-Lag, a direct result of passing through too many time zones in a matter of days. For bicyclists it is extremely rare due to the general size of time zones, but in certain areas like the Ural Mountains it is possible to ride through 2 time zones in 2 days and another just a week earlier.  The symptoms are generally wild disbelief during sunset, frequent distress at looking at the clock, mild insanity, and mild fever.

We had crossed finally into the Moscow time zone, leaving only Eastern Europe, Central Europe and Portugal left to change our clocks, but we had crossed so many so recently that we were having trouble adjusting, the sun is now setting at 8 at night, which might seem normal to you, but for us it has been setting at 11 for 5 months, suddenly you cross the Urals and a couple of time zones and you have dropped 3 hours.  Suddenly the sun reached it's high water mark at noon, not 4 in the afternoon, 5 is no longer the hottest hour of the day, it is time to start thinking about wherre to camp.  One good thing about it is that finally the television is correct, Russia runs everything on Moscow time, the trains schedules are in Moscow time even in Vladivostock, as are all the television stations (they really took the idea of a Centralized state too far), so if you see an add for a show at 10 at night you then have to figure out what time ten at night in Moscow is in the area you live, I guess all Russians must keep a calculator right next to the remote control.

The second day of off road also brought another first, as we swerved and skidded through miles of beach sand we suddenly came around a corner to findd ourself at a dead end, we had hit our first bridgeless river, we had to sit down and wait, just like the small line of cars (it turned out that there were several reasons why no one came on this road) for the ferry departure time.  Eventually us, a few cars and a truck carrying some sheep made our way to the other side, which signalled the end of the off road, for now.

Finally a day late and a couple bolts lighter we rolled into Kazan, the capital of Tartarstan.  The first thing you notice about Tartarstan is that it is a Autonomous Republic which is of the Muslim faith, there are Mosques everywhere, creating a very interesting city center here in Kazan, a blend of Russian Churches and Muslim Mosques dominate the skyline.  According to one guy I talked to it is home to the world's smallest metro system, 4 stops, I used it today, it is quite grand (as all soviet metros are), quite simple, and quite deserted, I imagine most people prefer to walk the short distance it covers.  It is perhaps the oldest city we have spent anytime in, being the capitol of a large Tartar kingdom before the Russia defeated and overtook them during Ivan The Terribles reign.  We spent our first evening splitting our time between delicious Kebab stands direct from their Turkish roots, and Macdonalds where a caffeine starved individual like myself can get a real cup of coffee with milk for just a dollar fifty, then heading back to the room for some good old fashioned hand washing of clothes because the only laundromat we found could wash our clothes no sooner than ten days from now.   Next stop Moscow, hopefully they have a laundromat.
ellski

It was one of those things that only sounds good while sitting in a nice hotel room after eating a big breakfast at the buffet. 950km in 6 days. It was just the kind of thing that after a really tough stretch from Novosibirsk to Omsk that the Idiots wanted mentally but dreaded physically. We needed a mental boost after completely losing it on the last section, but probably our bodies in fact I think no ones bodies need 6 100 mile days in a row, but we are idiots and always err on the side that most people wouldn't (hence finding ones self in the middle of Asia on a bicycle)  But there was no getting out of this one, that was the real idiocy of it, we had to make it there because we had to speak on the 7th day. 
 But we got out there hungry, the wind was behind us, the road was flat and we knew that once this section was over we would be in Europe (Yekaterinburg is nestled in the middle of the Urals and just outside the west side of the city is the land boundary between Europe and Asia).  The wind was behind us just as weather.com promised (never had a forecast actually be correct), and we got out there and rode as if the nothing could stop us.  We beat our getting out of a city curse, managing not to get lost or delayed along the way.  After facing so many headwinds on the trip, it was great to feel the wind at our back, if you chose you didn't even really have to pedal, but we had a schedule to keep. We did 140km the first day and felt good and optimistic.  The road from Omsk to Yekaterinburg seemed in some small ways much improved from the last stretch, there were truck stops again, our favorite stopping grounds, the road itself didn't have the extensive potholes that were so numerous before that you wondered if the air force used the road from Novosibirsk to Omsk as target practice.
 
When it comes to the 200km days the eating borders on the grotesque, no one should be eating like this, but the hunger is intense.  5 ice cream bars is not over doing it on a day when you are riding 126 miles a day, it is just a good way of cooling down, ordering 3 orders of the Russian equivalent of tortellini isn't over doing it on a day you are riding 126 miles it is just a good way of getting protein and carbs, it is so over the top sometimes you stand back as the cooks bring out the food and say I can't believe I will eat this and probably still be hungry.
 
I think that the days travelled from Omsk to Yekaterinburg will be forever hanging in the back of Levi and I's minds as the most intense of the trip and the reward (getting to the verge of Europe) the most sweet, I doubt we will have to work so hard to get out of Russia or to get to Porto as we have to get to Europe. The days were long and the nights were short, at one point in the middle of the consecutive 200km days I broke out something I had long put away, as being unnecessary, my wristwatch. I started timing our breaks, trying to give us more time to sleep at the end of the day, there are few things more annoying than a timed break, but getting that extra hour at the end of the day is pretty sweet.  We forced ourselves out of bed daily at 5 am when it was still dark and pedalled until there was no light left in the sky, around 10.  By the 4th day we were exhausted, but were only 250km from Yekaterinburg, so in theory we only had to go 130km each of the next two days, but we all know that that isn't how Idiots work, we rode about 50km and happened to pull into a very nice cafe and hotel, suddenly a wave of exhaustion hit us both.  We decided to go right to bed at noon, and do another 200+ day the next day, just one more big one to get us out of Asia.  The hotel itself appeared to be a former military barracks turned hotel, there was a guard tower and quite a bit of fencing surrounding the obviously soviet structure, but we didn't mind we parked our bikes next to the large road work vehicles (road workers are the main clientele of the Russian Roadside Hotel), and passed out in the small stuffy room even with the sun baking the sheets. 
 We did the final 200 climbing into the Urals to find Yekaterinburg, it turned out that the Urals around Yekat are nothing more than rolling hills, which was a nice surprise.  It was a marvelous moment to climb the first rolling hill and look back at that long tough stretch of plateau that extended all the way to Novosibirsk, "whew, good to get that out of the way".  Our way into the city was guided, luckily by a fellow cyclist we met on the road, Dmitri, he took us right to our doorstep at the Ural Polytechnic University dormitory. 
Yekaterinburg is certainly deserving of being the gateway to Europe, it is far more open and spacious than some of the previous cities we have been to, with many parks and modern buildings, few of the heavy solid Soviet apartment building.  It is the sight of the death of the last Tsar and his family in 1918, the sight of their deaths and the location of their burials have both become sights of churches.  The Church On The Blood downtown marks the spot of the house where the last Romanovs were killed (Boris Yeltsin had the house destroyed in the seventies), and surrounding the mine shafts where the bodies were found in the 90's there is now a series of seven small churches, one representing each person killed, and a small mmonastery.
 
Our time in Yekaterinburg has been enlightening, we came in tired and rather grumpy, but by the end of our stay here we find ourselves revitalized for the second half of the trip.  The first day of our stay  we tried to do a American Corner talk, it was our first talk since Blagoveshchensk, and we bombed, or at least we were not as positive and funny as we would like.  It was the first time we got to talk about the off road section, the bad roads, the wind, the mosquitoes, the food poisoning, the immense nothingness, and we still wanted to cover some other things like : the drinking, the cold, the wild fires.  By the end of us blabbing, one man stood up and asked in complete sincerity, "well with how you describe the far east, wouldn't it be better if we tore up the road and made eastern Russia a nature reserve?" another man said "I am so disappointed in my country that it has disappointed you." Disappointed are you kidding? It's been way better than we could have imagined, we love it, we just needed to vent to someone (we only get to talk to other people about every 3 weeks), it just happened to be the entire population of English speaking Russians in Yekaterinburg, an unfortunate choice.  In the end no one seemed to mind too much our whine fest, most thought the stories were quite funny, even if Russia did happen to be the but of the joke most of the time, we even were presented some t-shirts.  The next day Chris from the American Consulate took us all around Yekaterinburg, including out to the mine/Monastery where the Romanov's bodies were found, although a solemn location it was very beautiful and had some of the most wonderful wooden churches we have seen yet.  Chris was also very generous in giving us two big jars of peanut butter from his private stash, there is no better gift to a cycle tourer in Asia than a big jar of Extra Crunchy Jiffy.  We met up with a cycling club as well, and talked gear and kilometers, finally ending our day by getting some nutritional supplements from two nice girls, Olga and Olga, to help us on our next stretch. By the end of this stay we have rather regained our sense of adventure, which somewhere out there between Novosibirsk and Omsk had been scared off by all the screaming and yelling at the swamp and wind. I think we are ready to cross that arbitrary line in the sand and start riding in Europe.
ellski
 
Oh and I almost forgot, I bet you want some numbers, they are incomplete as we still have about 30km to go so probably just add 1 to each column.
THE CONTINENT OF ASIA:
Kilometers travelled: 7813
Kilometers without pavement:2000
Days on the bike: 76
Days Althaus was stuck in bed because of food poisoning: 10
Flat Tires: 60
Times lost: 0 (oh yeah!!)
Number of times the frames broke: 4
Countries Visited: 1, still not even done with it yet
Outhouses visited: 2000
Outhouses that were too bad to use:700
Number of times a man screamed out Otkuda (where?) from a moving vehicle: 1,450,387
Number of wild marijuana passed growing on the side of the road: 1.5 billion (estimate)
Number of wild marijuana plants growing out of outhouses: more than you want to think about
Number of birch trees passed: infinite
Number of mental break-downs: would have to know how many wind gusts there were in the last month
Autographs signed: too numerous to remember, ahh being a celebrity in the Russia Far East, the good ole days.

Author's Note:
We recently did a talk at an American Corner to a group of english speaking Russians, and although on the whole it did go well, many people felt that it came off anti-Russia, or at least didn't make Russia sound to appealing.  This is in no way my objective or at all how I feel about Russia and it scares me to think that this might be how people are interpreting my blogs. I will continue to write about the silly incidents and absurd aspects of travelling through Russia as I would travelling through the US that is just my way of writing, but hopefully you will understand that these are isolated incidents and that we overall have had an amazing time here and the Russian people have been more generous and welcoming and the landscape has been more beautiful and interesting than we possible could have imagined while we poured over maps 8 months ago. Thank you Russia, and no offence meant.
Ellski
 
We left Novosibirsk with a little tinge of dread, not only leaving our comfy penthouse suite, but heading out into a part of Russia that in some ways we were dreading, the plains.  It had always rather held our interest, from Novosibirsk to the Ural Mountains you cross a huge steppe, and at the end you are in Europe. Looking at in my room back home Levi and I saw a larger version of the US Midwest and drifted into revery about the truck stops and wide open spaces, riding into a city called Omsk, and the speed with which we would dispense with the plains.  "Omsk! That's going to be a wild night, maybe more than one, god I can't wait to get to Omsk." Levi had said on more than one occasion.
 
But slowly along our trip we had gotten a different impression of what it might be like, Denis in Vladivostok said "It's just a huge swamp, millions of huge mosquitoes", Baikal, Alexei, pointing at the stretch from Novosibirsk to Yekaterinaburg, said "Here it is going to get really remote again, worse than the off road" and of course there was always the stern warning we had gotten at the beginning of the trip from Mark Jenkins, telling us that the headwinds he experienced, especially on the flats were nearly catastrophic for their trip. 
 So standing at the edge of Novosibirsk looking at a limitless horizon on a windy and rainy day we found ourselves once again saying "God, I can't wait to get to Omsk!"
 
It wasn't perhaps so bad the first day, we went slower than usual, but the wind was more of a cross than a full on headwind, and it came kind of in waves, it would gust and then almost retreat into a tailwind, like an under toe on the beach, so you would be pulled for a few seconds, get your momentum up for just a few seconds before you got pounded by the next gust.  By the end of the day we really felt pretty good about our chances of accomplishing our new and ambitious route plan, we wanted to spend the next month travelling big distances without stopping much, riding north instead of south, heading to Moscow and then on to St. Petersburg before turning west and heading through Europe. It would require a month of hard riding to avoid the bad weather, being on a very strict schedule of long days and short nights, but it was very feasible, and the first day of facing the plains left us thinking it was in fact possible.  We camped that night and indeed found more bugs than before, but nothing too bad, we still had not gotten out our bug nets, and in fact they were facing deportation in the next package to home.
 
The next day the wind was almost behind us, and we rode for a personal best 220km, but even with a slight advantage from the wind, cracks were beginning to show, especially after a month of very scheduled riding.  I had for months been thinking, and we had been joking, about the concept that we were too young and inexperienced to be bike tourers, we are once again the youngest guys out here and overall bike touring seems to be for mostly newly weds and retirees (two groups you might not think perfectly matched for cycle touring but it is true).  For us we get up exhausted and think of only one thing, getting through the day as quickly as possible so that we can get back to bed and get some rest again, we live for our days off and are striving to get to a point where we can just slow down and ride less km.  But when you meet other riders out here, they are invariably older and they just spend the entire day on the bicycle, 10 or so hours, just cruising along, going at a much slower rate than us, but never taking days off, in the end they have inevitably gone twice as far in half the time as us.  It's an old man (and woman)'s game patience is the name of the game.  Although in our defence, our main goal is to see the country of Russia, the one we are most interested in, they are going through it as fast as possible in an attempt to make it to Mongolia, the country that everyone else on a bicycle in the world seems to be most interested in.  At one point during our trip to Omsk we were actually made fun of by a 60+ year old Frenchman when we told him how far and how long we had come. 
 
It is this lack of zen that often caused problems on Team Idiot on the flats, the whole trip so far has not tested your mental stamina in the way one day out in the flats did, even on the off road where you went through fewer towns and went at a much slower pace so that you might only see one or two towns or settlements a day at least had hills and mountains to focus your attention and enthusiasm on. Here on the flats you just keep your legs moving and watch the horizon for something to strive for, going through a town every few hours.  Song lyrics race through your head again and again, the same little snippet over and over to the rhythm of your legs turning, slowly the lyrics change inevitably into some sort of verbal attack on the wind or the flats. Levi is a master at this art, be it because he suffers even more frustration because he wasn't a cyclist before and is more unused to the frustration of the wind slowing you down and howling in your ear or because he is losing his mind, he never fails to have a new one when break time comes. There are some wonderful things about the flats as well though, there is something magical about riding through the endless fields sunflowers or golden wheat that one comes across every few hours, often they are filled with hundreds of crows that give you a feeling of a living Van Gogh painting, you can stare off at the limitless sunflowers for hours just wondering how far off they go. 
 
By the end of the 220km ride we were exhausted, we had planned to ride only about 180, but we really wanted a hotel as the weather looked threatening and it is better to just get a hotel room, that way in the morning you don't have to hang around trying to dry the tents.  Unfortunately by the 180km marker there wasn't a hotel just waiting for us, so we trudged on another 40km, watching the ominous sky.  It was one of those moments right out of a comedy, we finally made it to the hotel, I could barely climb the stairs my legs were so sore, but I went in and ordered a room for 2. "Nyet" was the curt reply I received "why?" I asked, thinking "could this place really be filled? I'm in the middle of nowhere and there are about 2 cars in the parking lot."
"No foreigners"
Perfect. We wound up negotiating to sleep in the parking lot, and luckily it didn't rain. However the next morning we could barely move, and as it turned out, it was the first headwind day. It didn't take long, it was lunch break when it happened, " Aw ##$@# this, I am not going to get up every day at 6am for the next month and ride 150km until 9 at night, this is my bike trip and I am going to relax and just chill out and ride." And just like that it was over, we are going north still, to Moscow, because quite frankly the photo of us with the bikes in front of the Kremlin is simply to tempting, then we will meander through Europe at our own speed, going where we please.
 
Things calmed down after that moment, we decided not to worry about these things, we had, after all, finally caught back up and then some with where we wanted to be at this time on the trip, and really things had been going splendidly, our flats had decreased to almost non-existent, the way it should be, we were strong enough to go 200km if need be and go 160 for days on end, but we didn't need to according to the numbers, we now can (and will) just ride about 140km a day and make our way to Moscow, snap a picture and continue on into Europe. It sounded to heavenly to even imagine. We went only a few more kilometers that day before we found another roadside hotel and said, "yeah we're worth it, let's stay in another hotel tonight"
"Nyet" was the response again, we are beginning to consider Russian brides just so that we can stay in the hotels again, but luckily the attendant directed us down the street to another hotel that does accept foreigners (or more accurately doesn't ask too many questions)
We were woken up the next morning by the howl of the wind, but we didn't let that bother the new zen Idiots, had a leisurely breakfast and packed up, hopped on the bikes and did a leisurely 80km (okay I'm exaggerating a bit, when the wind is blowing that hard it is difficult to describe anyone' attitude as zen, but there was a more casual attitude towards the shouting at the wind, less desperation) It was at some point during that day that we met the 60+ year old Frenchmen who started every sentence with "foooooh!" and proceeded to make fun of us "Foooh! very slow. Fooooh! maybe too much gear. Fooooh I must be off now I go to Australia, Fooooh" I guess no one told him there isn't a road.
 
Finally the next day we cruised into Omsk, we have noticed that with every Russian city we ride into there are about three things that happen about 100 to 150km outside of them without fail, it becomes incredibly remote, the road gets so bad you can hardly ride on it, and the traffic becomes unbearable, Omsk was no exception, in fact in terms of remoteness it took the cake, when we reached the sign there wasn't a house to be seen, as far as I could see we were still out on the flats.
 
Omsk held special significance for me not only because it was a strangely named four letter city in the middle of the map in my room, but also because it was here that Dostoevsky was imprisoned for 4 years.  My obsession with Dostoevsky is what partially drives this trip and so it was a great treat to finally make it to a city of significance in his life.  Our first impressions of Omsk, were very positive, the outskirts seemed to have a very mixed population, not just Russians, but people seeming to hail from all over the former Soviet Union which was interesting to see.  It is also a major industrial city, where many of the factories from Western Russia were evacuated to during WWII, which is a very strange thing to see, factories rather forced into any open spaces in the region.  We found ourselves overcome with the west in Omsk, we stayed in the Hotel Omsk (creative name) which featured an all you can eat Russian breakfast buffet (not really sure if it was all you can eat, but no one seemed to mind when we did).  On our way down to meet Maria, a girl who had kindly offered to show us around the city after seeing our site, we discovered a TGI Fridays in downtown Omsk, which conveniently had the cheapest business lunch in town, we couldn't resist.
We spent the afternoon relaxing and walking around Omsk with Maria, she took us to the Dostoevsky Museum and showed us around the city of Omsk which we really took to.  We spent 3 full days in Omsk, avoiding any sort of work at all  (I am writing this blog from Yekaterinburg), letting ourselves heal mentally and physically.
Of course by the third day we were feeling pretty good again, strong and happy, we knew that the wind, at least according to weather.com, would be behind us for the next 6 or so days. We did have to set a date to give a talk at the American Corner in Yekaterinaburg before we left Omsk, so when the director told us we could either give the talk in 7 days or 11, we looked at each other as only two complete idiots can and said  "well with the wind behind us we can probably do 950km in 6 days, it'll be a challenge."
"yeah and I like a challenge"
"Maybe we can even do it in 5 if we do just straight 200's"
we texted the director back, "we'll be there in 6 days"
it's almost as if we learned nothing
 
ellski

 I am sitting right now in what can only be described as a penthouse suite in Russian terms, on the eleventh floor of a Novosibirsk high rise, surrounded by the finest Chinese veneer that money can buy. We each have our own bed and there is even a computer hooked up to the internet on a desk by the window, it is magnificent, I get to write my emails and look out over the third largest city in Russia. But I guess this is jumping ahead in the story, according to your reading I am still in Krasnayarsk, well consider this my first dabbling in the dreaded flashback writing.
 
If there is one thing the Idiots don't know how to do it is leave a city we have tried and failed many a time to get "a big start" at the beginning of a new push, but have yet to achieve it, we rarely even get a normal day out of a city, usually we do about half of what we would do normally, when I look back through my journal, numbers like 40km, 70km, 25 km repeatedly stand out next to the phrase  "Well we left Blank today, but..."  Krasnayarsk was no different The city itself was a maze that took us an hour to figure out how to solve, then there were the two flat tires Levi suffered in the first 2 hours, this sadly required a patch break, because the team mechanic (!?!) forgot to patch tubes while we were in Krasnayarsk, luckily thanks to our new found speed we found our selves at a cafe having done 90km a few hours later. "Should we push another 30km today or leave it be, as is we have 3 perfect 150km days ahead of us to Kemerovo, then we rest one day there and push on too Novosibirsk with another two 150km days, I like the challenge I think."
"yeah lets do it, the terrain has been pretty good, nice and flat so we should be able to do it no problem."
That was that, enough said, we walked into the cafe and ate ourselves silly.
We awoke early in the morning to find a change, we had been debating it for days, could it really be that summer is winding down here already? The dews were getting heavier, the trees didn't seem to have that deep lush green look and indeed some of them seemed to be fading. It seems that in seasonal time here it is late August, which would makes sense, in Off The Map there is talk of a frost on August 11th something we found unfathomable two weeks ago but now seems quite logical.  Fear not, it isn't going to start snowing and drop to Siberian winter temperatures, it still gets to about 85 or so every day, the mornings are just cooling off again, time to break out the "morning layer" again.  We rode along trying to process and either prove or disprove that the season was turning all day to no avail, indeed it might be just in our head, perhaps the last 3 weeks was an intense heat wave and this is what summer is really like here, or perhaps this is a cold spell, this is Russia, anything is possible.  The terrain stayed flat and we flew along alternating fields of wild flowers now seeming to fade, wheat which seemed ages from being harvestable and birch trees which seemed to be getting ready to change colors.  As we pulled into a cafe at the end of the day (we did our 150 no problem) we met 3 other cyclist coming from Moscow, they were Russian, so we were unable to get quite as much out of them as we would like, however we did learn that on one day on the flats they got a strong tailwind and cruised an unbelievable 260 km which is something like 160 miles, incredible.  I don't see us catching a westerly wind of that magnitude on this trip but if we do I'm shooting for 300. 
We were slow in getting ready the next day and slow in doing everything really, but we managed even with 3 flats to make it about 140km to a big town with a hotel, Mariinsk, about 160 km from Kemerovo. We figured hey we will stay in the hotel get an early start and do a cool casual 100 miles tomorrow.  I even texted Natasha and Nikita, a couple that had contacted us on our website and told them we would reach there city around 7 (we would be staying in their apartment).  It seemed perfect.  The next morning things fell apart from the start, it was one of those hotels where there was only one bathroom and everyone else lives there on a semi permanent basis, the line is terrible, we couldn't get out until 9 o clock, but no worries, we knew we still had plenty of time.  A few hours later Levi had the first dazzling crash of the trip while trying to turn around to fast to look at some flowers, we took a few minute breather, again knowing that really things were going fine, our pace was fast and the roads flat and good from here to Europe, the day before I had rather confidently but honestly said "Right now I think we are strong enough that I am not afraid of big winds, mountains or rain, I think that we can power through them and make good time if we have to." I stand by those words, still. All day there was a fair head wind, which of course made sense to us after I had made such a remark there was certainly going to be some backlash.
By around 4 we were just lounging, knowing we had about 4 hours left of riding but not too concerned, Natasha and Nikita would understand. It was right about then that I got a call from Natasha asking us where we were, I told her and said that I thought we would be in Kemerovo around 8, "But you said 7 yesterday, I though you told me 7." Natasha was pissed. So we got on our bikes and started racing towards the city, still a cool 90 km away.  Much like the surprise Fall a few days ago we were not prepared at all for what was happening to us, we started climbing, not just a little bit of climbing either, the kind of climbing one associates with a mountain range.  "Are we going back into the mountains? Is this possible?"  We couldn't believe it, finally I texted Natasha, "Is there a mountain range here that we didn't know about." She responded "Yes there are a lot of mountains, will I see you soon?"  We continued to race, pushing ourselves trying to make good time, slowly the rainclouds were forming overhead.  The thunderstorm didn't start until we were about 20 km outside the city, but it didn't matter, it was so intense that everything was soaked almost instantly, but in a way it was quite refreshing, if laughable.  We continued to fly as fast as we could, but when there are mountains, it is not a speed sensation you get, it is not like when you are on the flat, there you can get your bike moving fast enough to pretend for a minute that it isn't stacked high with 50 lbs of gear and that you are a real cyclist, on mountains you are a workhorse, pulling a mammoth weight up the hill only to fly too quickly down to the bottom of the next climb.
Really it was quite a scene, us pushing our hardest against the mountains, lightning and thunder clapping down all around us, the traffic getting heavier as we neared the small "mountain city" of Kemerovo. We finally made it to the city gate and of course no one was mad, we had raced for nothing (although if we had taken our time we would have spent even more time in the rain), they met us with bicycles and shared in our drenched adventure back to their apartment (along the way I took my first fall of the trip, not much to right home about, but none the less a tumble).  When we finally got the bikes up to the apartment we were beaten men, we could barely move, not only had we pushed big numbers for the last few days, now the mountain sprint had left us breathless, we gobbled down some borscht and pizza and went to bed. 
 We slept late the next morning in our double bed (!?!), which was a great extravagance for us. Natasha and Nikita seemed to have the day all planned for us, which can often be a good or bad thing. We had breakfast while Nikita looked over our bikes (he was very into cycling mechanics apparently). He immediately deemed them unridable and said we should go to the local bike shop.  Anytime you have someone who speaks fluent Russian and has a knowledge of bikes you just tend to agree to whatever they say, it is better to have things replaced here with Nikita talking than later with me trying to explain what I want by pointing.  So soon we were back on the bikes (groan) and riding presumably to the bike shop. One of our biggest problems with home stays is food, everyone feeds us well, gives us great home cooked meals and really if I wasn't riding a bicycle 200k a day I would be over fed, but after a dinner and a breakfast at home Levi and I were already conspiring ways to escape to a super market and gorge ourselves. As we got out onto the street Natasha told us we would be going to a museum, we agreed of course but only after a sideways glance towards each other.  The museum turned out was on the top of a huge hill, making our legs relive the terrors of the day before and our stomachs question if this was the proper way to the supermarket. 
The museum itself was fascinating, Kemerovo is just opposite Kuzbass where just after the creation of the Soviet Union there was an experiment to make an independent and advanced workers colony. Bill Haywood a prominent American socialist and others were involved with Lenin's blessing. It was an amazing museum, showing that up until Lenin's death workers from all over the world came here to Kuzbass to help build a better society (it turned out that all the mountains we were passing were filled with coal, the engine that drove the project).  There was running water and electricity long here long before anywhere else in Siberia (still lacking from what I have seen).  Upon Lenin's death,  Stalin's paranoia and persecution of foreigners caused the downfall of the colony, most of the workers returned back to the United States or whichever country they had originated from.  All this I was able to absorb while lying to my stomach, telling him we were just in a really long line at the supermarket.
 
Finally at the end of the coal mine could be seen, "Ok guys let's go drop the bikes off at the shop." said Natasha.
"And get a pizza each?" Levi and myself chorused in our minds.
We got to the bike shop and Nikita was there to meet us. We got rid of our bikes, no more riding today, phew now let's eat.
"Okay guys, now we want to take you to a national park for a little hiking, then we will all go home and eat, the park is about 1 hour each way."
"Let me talk to her I'll set her straight!!!" My stomach bellowed.
"A hike!?!" My legs screamed.
We managed to convince them to stop for a snack along the way, Levi and I jumped out of the car like two convicts making a jail break, running to the closest kiosk and buying a loaf of bread to supplement whatever snacks they insisted on buying for us (again they were perfect hosts, we are just absurdly hungry guests).  We managed to tide ourselves over for what turned out to be a simple walk through the forest to some very old and interesting cave drawings along the Tom river. We got back to the bike shop, collected our bikes, which seemingly had nothing done to them, and returned home for dinner. We ate a very delicious meal, but again Levi and I began to conspire to get out and gobble down some extra nourishment. We used the excuse of coffee, luckily she took us to what resembled an American style 50's diner and we had what most would consider an unnecessary second meal. 
The next morning we left Natasha and Nikita, they were excellent hosts, the Kuzbass museum and the cave drawings were not to be missed now that I looked back on it. We simply have an unending hunger which turns us into grumpy edgy old men if not fulfilled every few hours.  It was 260 kilometers to Novosibirsk, a cool 2 days ride, where we could relax and do just 130 each day or as we were hoping do most of it the first day out of Kemerovo and relax and have an extra half day in Novosibirsk the next day.  It was of course not to be, we got lost leaving Kemerovo in a way that I had not experienced since my parents and I travelled together.  It took us three tries to leave the city, we continued following a circuit of signs saying Novosibirsk, but always brought us back to the same spot, it may not seem so bad, but when you look down at your odometer and realize you have done 50km already and haven't gotten anywhere your hopes for that half day in Novosibirsk fade, you know that tomorrow is going to be bad.  Indeed by the time the sun was falling in front of us we had just knocked the 60th kilometer off the 260 and we were standing in front of a roadside hotel.  We decided to push tomorrow and break our record of 194, see if we couldn't get to 200 km, cycling procrastinators.
 
And we did it, we flew, averaging 25 km and hour, knowing that a three day rest awaited us in the the mighty industrial city of Novosibirsk. There were no surprise mountain ranges, just rolling hills which were slowly tapering off as we now are approaching the plateau, the Russian Steppe.  At the end of the day as we stood outside the apartment building our odometers read 202, suddenly 271 seems in sight, now we just need a tailwind.
ellski