I finally found the time to write about our trip to Crimea!
Crimea is a peninsula next to Sochi, part of Ukraine. It was assigned there by the well-known corn lover in 1954. Our trip was organized by Vladimir Zhilkin, also known as a one-man band one-man website - travelling.lv. Ukraine had been tempting me for a long time, and even though Crimea isn't exactly it, I really wanted to go, and as much as fate tried to get in my way — I managed it.
We rode in a van, not a very comfortable one, unfortunately. We traveled with bicycles on the roof, because the idea was exactly to ride them around down there.
The fee to Vladimir was 250 LVL ($500), which included the round trip with the bikes on the van, van services on the spot, breakfast, dinner, as well as sleeping in tents. In theory - also planning the route so that it goes through interesting places, but more on that later.
The track of how we drove there (2020 km). We traveled from October 8 to 16, 2010, so about a week.
https://www.gpsies.com/map.do?fileId=iyhtofgazbdpbihn
And some photos of how we drove there.
Riding in a van is very tedious, pretty much as I expected. I'll try to avoid 35-hour trips from now on. Yoga poses helped relieve muscle tension, but I got lazy and only did them at the beginning.
We stopped in the middle of nowhere to buy water, and there were these doggies
These are the hikers, Zhenya and Olga
Bicycles on the roof
This is sort of a monument in the shape of a cannon
There is simply an endless amount of all sorts of sacred buildings all over Ukraine, mostly with golden domes
And in general, they're doing fine with monuments