Sveta had to go stand with the girls as they all had on their best smiles today. We always look for the sunflower fields and this year it looked like we would not find them, but luck held and we found sunflowers as far as the eye can see. Russians love salted or unsalted sunflower seeds and you can find a Russian eating them all over the place, from the metro to the villages. Babushkas sell them at metro entrances and they also sell them near a busy bus stop in a village…
The photo above is a real highway located on the GPS system. It is a highway and this is typical of Russian roads we travel on. This particular spot was about 20 kilometers in from the nearest paved highway. This is the only road to the village we were traveling to and by the time we were done we found ourselves deep in mud and ruts made by tractors that use this road also. This is how we love to travel and Sveta and I are seriously contemplating turning our Sammy (Volga) into a 4X4 as it is easy to do. Now you understand why we drive a Volga around Russia. I can get parts in any village as there is old Volga’s everywhere. I call this highway in the photo above a two lane super highway… 🙂
We found the village and after three more villages and lots more highways like this we finally got to our highway that led to our village and I finally got to see state work and what they do to work on these roads, but if we were not Russian road savvy, we would have drove off a bridge that was history and not marked as such. But being good little Russian road drivers, we realized at the last second that there was a new road and it was a bridge replacement. The bridge looked pretty sad and to have crossed it, we would have been in the river, Sammy and us…
Have a good day and we are in the rain all day again…
Kyle and Sveta
Windows to Russia…
PS: Pretty amazing pictures for a cellphone!