Road trip around central Russia series. Intro.
#payitforward
Between 9th and 30th of August 2014 I participated in the road trip over central Russia with my musician friends. I am going to do a series of posts about it, but it is going to be out of order. Since my internet connection is a bit bad right now and not all of the photos are online yet.
On the right is our driver Shum, girl in the center is Masha & yours truly is on the left.
Our driver Shum has a tradition of hitting the road every time he has a vacation, or any sort of long national holidays permit him. Also, he is a musician, and goes to participate in festivals and other gigs. He was looking for people to participate, which would bring the cost of fuel down, as well as provide a good company, which is essential in a good roadtrip.
The trip was almost five thousand kilometers over almost a month. We started by attending a festival near Kazan, as well as doing a gig there. Then we went along Volga river visiting Ulyanovsk, Saratov, Volgograd. Then instead of following the river we went through Kalmykia, visiting their capital of Elista, and finaly going to the Black Sea through Anapa with a stop in Abrau-Durso, which is famous for its sparkling wines. After we bid Masha a farewell, as she went toward Crimea and we headed back towards Moscow.
Strange meetings on the road
In Volgograd we met Ben, who was going by tandem bicycle all the way from England with a goal to reach Northern India and have a tea with Dailai Lama. You can check out Ben's adventures here.
Im going to tell him about steemit, and hopefully you'll be able to read about all of his adventures on this site.
Ben's friends made an action figure of him. He is just that cool!
Also, we picked up a stuffed lion in Volgograd, and he participated in our trip all the way to Moscow.
The lion! >:3 and our car.
While in Anapa, I found a oreying mantis dazed & confused on the boardwalk and saved his life, which proved to be important on our road back, when another preying mantis saved our life, when our car had a nasty accident.
The mantis that I saved in Anapa.
This one we fished out from under the hood of our car, after the accident. We stopped right next to a big hole in the ground.
Next time Elista, the capital of Kalmykia & one of the biggest centers of Buddhist culture in Europe!
We slept in one of theese.
Wow xanoxt! These are some really great pictures and some awesome adventures you had! Im looking forward to the next installment! Upvoted and followed!
Also wanted to take a moment and say thanks for playing #payitforward yours was the first time ive seen anyone follow the rules perfectly and it totally proved my point and vindicated my efforts creating it in the first place!
Well, thank you with comming up with the idea in the first place. The rules are actually quite easy, although I have to admit, that I am using the Markdown markup instead of HTML, since it is a bit easier. Too bad the markup languages that some wikis use aren't available, they are a lot like Markdown, but a little bit more robust.
@xanoxt hey if you've figured out the markdown syntax for a proper anchor tag rather than using HTML, that's just awesome! I never sorted it out and have been advocating HTML a href stuff because of my own ignorance.
Point was to shorten the link so the relevant bit was there and it didn't look like linkspam.
You did it perfectly!
it is good to go to weird places and experience new things
Well, since I am Russian, I wouldn't call it weird. But yeah, I can second that notion!
The action figure looks more real than the guy holding it. His friend that made it did an awesome job.
It was one of the first uses for 3d scanning/printing studio his friends in Berlin had. Basicly you can get into the big scanner, and have a model of yourself printed, which is silly, but still pretty neat. Still, I hope he joins us here, because his adventures are much crazier then mine. I do hope to get at his level at some point though.