Sunday 15 July 2018
Another day of potholed roads and sandy tracks this time with the added spice of off roading down flooded ruts and crossing a large flooded section of land by motorised punt but all very exciting 🙂
I slept well and the breakfast was decent the first 1km of road was fine but then it descended into hell for 15km of bone shaking broken road surfaces before we started to ride along the top of the Volga’s retaining embankment with a sandy surface, in fact Strava awarded me second place for my effort!
Dropping down from this took as into heavily rutted tracks filled with water from last night’s storms 🙁 finally ending in a swamp with thousands of murderous biting insects before we ended up in a tiny boat with our bikes to get across a big lagoon. The other side was better and in fact we had time for a swim or more correctly a wade as the water is so shallow but excellent for washing the bike 🙂
Finally we hit a road with patches of tarmac to take us to the outdoor buildings museum and lessons on how to identify the age & prosperity of log cabin homes etc. Reasonably interesting 🙂
Afterwards it was over the huge Volga bridge and our waterside hotel in Kostroma followed by dinner on the moored boat, reminding me of The Natchez in New Orleans all those years ago.
The town itself is very pleasant with stone arcades like in Italy.
