Russia

We had given ourselves a short leg to St Petersburg today, our most Easterly destination, and with hindsight that was a good decision.

After breakfast we packed up and as we were about to leave noticed the F1 qualifying on the telly, albeit in German. We delayed our departure!

After a lunch at the hotel we headed for the Russian border. It was all quite methodically laid out and we were a dab-hand at filling the forms out, but it still took around an hour an a half to get through.

We kitted up an headed off East only to be stopped at a police checkpoint 500m down the road and asked to show everything again. 10 minutes later we were on our way again.

The Russian countryside was in a word broken. Brown, bleak, frozen and with a horrific road surface. No worries about speeding tickets for most of the ride as we couldn't do more than a few miles an hour picking our way around enormous potholes, cracks, and completely broken tarmac. Straight into the top 3 for contention as the worst road we've experienced.

We got to the sprawl of St Petersburg and spent a fair while homing in on the centre and despite the frustration finally found a part of the city to appreciate and shortly after that another helpful biker at work in his van who guided us in the right direction.

Helsinki is the plan for tomorrow then, starting back West, but it has started to snow quite heavily outside as we eat our dinner . . .

110 difficult miles makes 11 119 miles total.

Today we tried again to see the GP, but again failed! Oh well, we found the result out on BBC World news slightly later.

Apparently the clocks went forward over Saturday night so we ended up leaving an hour late! Nothing like a bit of forward planning.

We departed Vilinius in a Westerly direction and the roads were single track with the forested landscape surrounding them. It was still cold and there was the odd frozen lake dotted around. The landscape then opened up a touch as we drifted towards Russia.

We tried to stop at a lovely looking spot for lunch, it looked like a massive log cabin and with lots of cars in the carpark we had high hopes. The smell of a wood fire also inticed us in. The restaurant was however closed for a big function and we ended up having a kebab down the road in a car park!

After this there was a hundred miles left or so to the Russian border. We arrived here at around 5pm, we'd heard that it may be tricky getting through and even with our Visas it still took 2 hours. Once again though we managed to charm some of the border staff and in the end they were very helpful and they enjoyed our story!

The first bit of Russia gave us the similar sort of feeling we had had in the Ukraine with flat plains and flaming fields but even more so perhaps was that around the first corner we drove there was a cop standing slightly hidden, aiming a speed gun at us! Luckily we were both on best behaviour and we cruised past without being stopped.

It was around 80 miles to Kalinigrad with took around 2 hours as the roads had a 45 mph limit on them and we were wary of the crafty cops.

We checked into Hotel Kalinigrad at 9.30pm and low and behold found a replay of the GP on TV so ended up watching this before going out for some late food and a lovely relaxing beer.

225 miles ridden today.

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