Short note, more to come later. We’ve reached this larger town on lake that feeds into the Volga River (look on the road between St Petersburg & Vologda). Having fun cycling, though roads are quite variable. Plan to rest here for a day and then continue on Saturday.

This first bit, I’ll describe as our “bicycle boot camp”, as we figure out what to eat, where to camp and how to get across this part of Russia. The roads are sometimes rough which slows things down a fair amount. Let me briefly describe our evening “water ritual” at end of the day. As we’ve completed close to 100km in a day, we start looking for a place where we might end the day. We watch for signs along the road for one of the next villages and follow the road into the small village. Here we find people we meet and use various words for “well”, “spring”, “water” as well as some pantomine to indicate that we’re looking for some water. Folks help show us where to find the water and we fill up enough for camping. We then cycle just the last little bit to find a place not far off the road to camp. Two days ago, our water ritual led to an invitation to come inside, have some soup and otherwise meet folks [PEDAL folks note, Robin gave me a few chocolates with PEDAL on the wrapper; we gave one of these to the grandson].

Today in the big city, it is quite industrial outside town, as a steel town and smells it for a while. Fortunately, the wind was blowing away from the town. It took a bit to find a hotel today; the first one we were sent was expensive and small, but we’ve found a better one. Likely plan is to stay here two nights and then continue along our journey. Not sure about internet connections overall.