Episode 6There is the small town of Nevyansk about 100k’s north of Ekaterinburg with a leaning tower and a couple of other points of interest in the area so we headed off that way.This town was founded on the iron ore mined in the area around the very begining of the 18th century. An enterprising local built a smelter for processing the iron ore into cast iron. From then on the town prospered until the ore gave out in the late 1800’s or there abouts.T...

Episode 5We plodded on eastwards on a good road that bypassed all towns and villages. After some hours we saw our first agriculture this side of St Petersburg but we didn’t see any farm animals until we turned off this road and began to make our way southwards towards Yaroslavl. Just after turning south we passed through a very large industrial city, Cherepovets. First there was a big power station then what L thinks might be an agro chemical plant, Fosagro...

Episode 4At Pskov we spent a while looking for a bank, usually we don’t have any trouble finding banks but on this particular day they seemed to evade us and L ended up using an ATM instead only to find that she was limited to a 5000 rouble withdrawal. Do you people have any idea how little 5000 roubles is, well, it proved to be $108 AU, well less than 100 Euros and even in Russia it doesn’t go a long way. L worked it out at about 46 roubles to an Au$...

Episode 3So we continued on our way. We saw our first Storks nest while still in Germany. Then we crossed into Poland just outside Stiau, this is a 3 borders area with the Czech Republic border just to the south of the town. Just inside the Polish border there were lots of market stalls selling mostly fruit and veggies for Euros. They could possibly have been cheaper there than in Germany, however, as we didn’t need anything we didn’t stop. Soon we c...