Back on the Road

Saturday Jenya and I went in search of the tires, the shipping company was located in a pretty run down part of down and it felt like we were in some bad mafia movie, but eventually they were located. Denis had sent them through a private company, the Russian post office by all accounts is awful. Jenya was telling me items coming from Europe regularly spend weeks in customs and to send something even a few hundred miles could take a week or two if it even arrived at all.

I took a taxi to Andrei's shop, he was already hard at work and had welded a much more substantial bracket in place. I've been really impressed with the ingenuity of Russian mechanics, they don't necessarily have the newest technology by any means, but it seems they're able to fix just about anything. With me mostly looking on Andrei fitted the exhaust back on after a bit of struggling and replaced the tire, then he took the Scrambler for a short spin. A really generous guy, he did everything for free for his “American friend” as he called me, and obviously a pretty good motocross rider:

Saturday night Jenya and I went to check out a funk party and in the morning he cooked me a traditional Russian breakfast as a farewell:

I would be heading to Vladimir, the ancient capital of Russia about 280 miles southeast of Vologda. Vologda is a nice town and Vera and Jenya were amazing hosts, but after four nights in Vologda I was itching to start heading east again. It started off as a nice ride along the excellent Moscow-Vologda road, but an afternoon thunderstorm left me soaked, I did have the consolation of seeing the biggest rainbow I have ever seen:

Yana, the girl who translated for me when I had the problem with the bike, was unable to host me because someone was staying with her, but she found a place for me with her friend Ira. Yana and Ira study foreign languages at university and both of them spoke excellent English, I had trouble finding Ira's apartment but with some help from Yana eventually managed reaching it around 8pm. Once again I was spoiled by Russian hospitality, Ira had dinner waiting for me, and later Yana and her guest came over and I had a second dinner followed by some beer and interesting conversation.

After catching up on some much needed sleep I went on a lightning tour of Vladimir with Ira. Ira works occassionally as a tour guide and knew quite a bit about the city. She is also an excellent portrait photographer and uses a Zenith (a Soviet film SLR camera) to take her photos. Vera had the same camera, and I was really impressed with the quality of the photos. Vladimir seemed like a very interesting place, unfortunately because of the delay in Vologda and some long riding days I was falling quite a bit behind schedule and was anxious to reach Nizhny Novgorod, about 150 miles away, so I didn't get to explore the city as much as I would have liked.