The Drive

This is the fourth entry about our trip. Start at "Copenhagen" below if you want to read them in order. Here are the few pictures we took along the way.

After a comfortable and relaxing time in Minsk, we were off to our next stop: St. Petersburg. We spent some time investigating and debating how to get there. That region is currently under-served by airlines after a couple of bankruptcies, so tickets were too expensive to make flying an option. It's a 14-hour overnight train ride, which is the method of choice for most people - but not us. We chose to drive the 800 kilometers (475 miles - roughly equivalent to Minneapolis to St Louis for you midwesterners) in a single day.

It turns out that roads in Belarus are very nice: they're well-maintained, well-marked, and have lots of little picnic grounds to stop at. We passed many cute little countryside villages with brightly-colored wood houses. We took a break in the very old (founded in 862 AD) town of Polatsk and saw the Cathedral of Saint Sophia, considered to be the most beautiful church in Belarus. This part of the drive was quite pleasant.

Then we got to Russia. There's no passport control between the two countries, but there's a $5 toll for the privilege of driving on an quarter-mile stretch of "international" road. After getting through this and into Russia proper, we discovered why taking the train is the preferred method of long-distance travel there.

The roads in Russia were in very poor condition: they don't appear to have had any maintenance at all since the collapse of the Soviet Union. There are few or no signs telling you where to go (we got lost a couple times). The drivers are reckless to the point of being almost suicidal, and whatever traffic laws exist are universally ignored. Despite all this, we saw a number of police ticketing people for speeding - pretty clever when there aren't any speed limits posted.

Along the journey, we passed through several medium-sized towns - including Ostrov and Luga - that don't appear to have changed much from the Soviet days. They were interesting and almost kind of beautiful in a dilapidated, grim, the-world-has-forgotten-us sort of way.

We made our second stop in another historic town, Pskov. It has a walled old town/fortress that's in a nice setting along a river. It's the kind of place that could be a tourist destination if any investment were made in infrastructure (like signs telling you how to get around).

We were all pretty tired when, after 14 hours on the road, we arrived in Pushkin, the genteel town near St. Petersburg where we were staying (with a longtime friend of Anya's parents). While the roads are fine in & around St. Petersburg, it's clear that the less cross-country driving you do in Russia, the better.