another update:
yesterday drove back to Ukraine after the two week Poland trip.
ended up at the main poland/ukraine border crossing (krakovets) with a 1km queue of cars... so waifu called her contacts and we get a recommendation of a better crossing further norther.
prospect of spending 2-3 hours waiting in a queue not so good.
other crossing.. only 40 minutes away! 200m queue too. better!
but did you check the weather ? country roads.. in blizzard conditions. -10, snowing hard. funtimes.
at the start of the detour we come up to some polish border guard and wish them a merry christmas. they confirm the other crossing we are now heading to is better.
so starts one of the best drives I've ever done in the slippy silver slag. loaded up, luggage on the back, 1/3 tank of fuel. country roads, fully iced up, decent modern winter tyres..
that super tochigi-fuji diff in my slag came in handy. on almost every corner. let's just say waifu respects my driving a bit more now
anyway, we get to the good crossing. it's shorter. but typical ukrainian behaviour - you hop out to piss and the line moves, you get queue-jumped. crab bucket sums the border crossing experience up better.
anyway, 60 minutes of waiting we finally get the chance to be seen by the guards and immigrations. this takes 30 minutes, and the VIN on my car was checked twice.
(why ? they're paranoid about cars with wrong VINs - why ? because cars in poland are much cheaper than in ukraine and the ukrainian government seeks rent ($5K USD +-) on polish cars if they are not driven across the border every 5 days.. .seriously .. so some who have polish cars.. spend 1 evening in 5 at the border, wasting fuel, time, their lives, just to have a cheaper better car that happens to have a polish plate... yup
most of the cars at the border were waiting for midnight to cross so they'd do the 5 days fully. it's eastern europe. erk. )
anyway, both the polish and ukrainian sides checked my VIN. they didn't inspect my luggage, not properly anyway, but they looked over my engine bay... lol.
then we get to the ukrainian side of this border crossing. worst roads I've ever driven on. with luck some roads had their holes filled by solid snow/ice, but most were like a bouncy castle. the mk2.5 chewed thru it like a little champ tho
. on the longer sections the front lip was nomming the ice built up between the wheel tracks of other cars like a little piglet. we sang songs, she told me about the places we were driving past. it was epic but... worst roads... ever... . all this and snowed up.
satnav said 1 hour to lviv.. it took 2.5 hours, via a route the satnav had not considered remotely sensible. she told me the satnav was trying to take me via roads that weren't passable anymore (LOL).
summary: set off at 11am. arrived at lviv at 2am. satnav had said it was a 5 hour journey. we spent 3 hours eating/shopping. the rest was chewed up by road conditions and border crossing hell. 15 hours door to door. I have the patience of a saint, but it is expressed via... well..... as you may have been able to tell from how I write, I'm a bit of a deadpool on the inside (motor mouth). the Waifu discovered this. she's still getting used to it tho.
another opinion.. from a different perspective... lives here are ordered differently to those I know in the UK. people think nothing of food shopping at 10pm on a saturday. it's a very different world to blighty. city life and city community, less based on the sun than whatever people want to do. it works, but you wouldn't recognise some parts of it, such as the border crossing and car canoee discussed above.
fun fact: I still haven't used my chains. they are hiding on the parcel shelf unused and unsoiled. winter tyres.. are EPIC.
le sigh
Jul 15, 2023 20:03:52 GMT
le sigh
Jul 15, 2023 20:03:52 GMT