The Trip...

Well... It took us a little more than two days to make the 1,800 mile journey from Kendal, United Kingdom to Kyiv, Ukraine. We started around eight o'clock on Thursday morning and were at Operation Mobilization's Manna House by three or four in the afternoon where we met Anna.

In London we did some sightseeing (as you can see in the pictures below), had dinner at a Mexican place downtown and restarted our journey at around 11:30 P.M. We made it to our ferry across the English channel by around 1:00 A.M. and departed from Dover, UK to Calais, France at 2:10. The trip is a little under two hours and as soon as we boarded Dasha and I found a couple of couches to sleep on.

We woke up in France ready to start the longest leg of our journey. On Friday we went through France, Belgium, Holland, Germany and finally stopped at a rest area for a few hours sleep (in the car) in Poland at around 1:00 on Saturday morning.

We woke up quite early (by 7 o'clock at the latest) as the sun was just coming up. We made it to the Poland/Ukraine border by mid-afternoon and waiting several hours in line. It was quite hot outside and we were sitting in the car with the a/c running. We turned the car off when we finally got to the front and when we turning it off it BARELY had enough juice in the battery to get us going again. Very thankfully we made our we through the border gates and were finally on our way through Ukraine. That thankfulness was cut off pretty quickly when we were pulled over within 300 feet of the border by police officers wanting to check our documents... AGAIN! This time the car didn't start and one of the officers got behind the wheel and two were in the back pushing it to get it started again.

We were stopped twice more on our way home for disobeying the IMPOSSIBLE Ukrainian traffic laws but both times we were stopped by officers who had no intention of running everything through the justice system. I talked to them in English saying PROTOCOL (they have the same word in Russian) which basically means to them that I'm only giving money to the Ukrainian government through the official system... no 'fee on the spot' for me.

We finally made it home on Saturday morning at around 1:30 A.M. Quite a trip... But we made it.

I'll post a list of the cities we travelled through later.