Posted in on Aug 31st, 2012 1 Comment »
The plan to day is to try to get some batteries for the Spot satellite tracker and meet up with the Habitat for Humanity coordinator for Mongolia. Make some coffee and chat up the other residents of the hostel who are the usual mix of young or youngish backpacking tourists. As usual, we are the [...]
Posted in on Aug 31st, 2012 2 Comments »
Eddie, our GPS gets us out of Ulan Ude in morning traffic with no issues. We drive south into a mountain range that separates Russia from Mongolia. The road through the mountains is good and we make good time to the border. The Russian border exit customs goes smoothly. Even the car documentation goes smoothly [...]
Posted in on Aug 28th, 2012 No Comments »
Up to a beautiful blue sky. Pack the car and we’re gone. The South Africans beat us out but we left before any one else awoke. It’s going to be a long day, over 500 miles, and, to make matters worse, we have to retrace our steps back to Irkutsk before actually moving east. [...]
Posted in on Aug 28th, 2012 No Comments »
Well, there were no logging trucks and trains but there were three cars of Russians who arrived lake, dropped their bags and headed to town. All seemed quiet on the eastern front. Or so it seemed. They came back much later and, for what seemed like hours, laughed and joked the night away. If I [...]
Posted in on Aug 26th, 2012 5 Comments »
It’s been a very long night. The road that we found our lovely little camp site beside seemed a bit well traveled but we just put that down to daytime field work traffic. There’s a lot of harvesting going on and we just assumed that the apparent traffic was from tractors, grain trucks and other [...]
Posted in on Aug 26th, 2012 1 Comment »
The plan is to get an early start. We always have a plan to get an early but it’s always about 8:00 before we get moving. I checked the Spot tracker page and see that we are missing data. The old Spot seems to be working but there aren’t any data points on the share [...]
Posted in on Aug 25th, 2012 No Comments »
The most important thing on the to-do list is to get a new green card, the temporary auto insurance that you need to buy when you enter many countries. You have to have insurance on the vehicle that you bring into the country and the green card is the proof that you have valid insurance [...]
Posted in on Aug 23rd, 2012 5 Comments »
We’re up but not very early. Not only did we drive way into the night but we lost an hour to a time zone change. Now I’m 11 ahead of EDT and John is a whopping 14 hours ahead of PDT. Breakfast is substantial as you’d expect in a trucker hotel. Meat filled blintzes with [...]
Posted in on Aug 22nd, 2012 3 Comments »
Our route after Chelyabinsk had to go north and over the bulge that the Kazakh border pushes into Russia. Along the way, we finally stopped in a trucker motel that John just happened to spot as we drove past. The sun was already down and it was getting dark. This would do. With a couple [...]
Posted in on Aug 20th, 2012 6 Comments »
It’s been a long night. We changed time zones and lost still another hour. I overslept and missed calling Talyn and Mika. The car has a broken shock mount and we’ve got to get it fixed today. Up and out at 8:30. Room nescafe for breakfast. John and I want to get going on [...]
