Thursday 21st June - St Petersburg to Pskov

Pic 1. Picnic spot with not too much rubbish, where we cooked up meals from our supply of army rations.





Pic 2. Stopped by the police.











Pic 3. Pskov Kremlin.











Pic 4. me and Kremlin











Pic 5. Three generations of Russians out walking.









Pic 6. The ubiquitous Lenin statue.















Congratulations to Gordon and Sandy of P5 for their answer to the question about St Petersburg. Quite right, and I hope you enjoyed the school trip.

Thank you Paul for letting us know the cricket result - we were able to pass this on to the errant 30-98 in St Petersburg. They took it very well.

This morning we set off early, with the rally traffic, but soon lost them as they were heading to Tallinn in Estonia, while we were going south towards Vilnius, in Lithuania, but with a night's stop in Pskov en route.

A few miles outside St Petersburg we stopped for a mini service in a lay-by - oil change, cleaning the distributor, and changing spark plugs. The car seemed to go better after the attention.

The road was good - reasonable tarmac, and hardly any trucks, with attractive woodland - scabius, hare bells and monster cow parsley on the verges, along with the usual collection of rubbish. We were only stopped by the police three times - the first two at regular checkpoints, where they wanted to see our documents and chat. The third time a police car came up on our tail, siren and lights going, and pulled us over. I was nervous, but the two policemen climbed out of the car smiling, camera phone in hand, asking if they could take a picture.

We filled up with petrol just outside Pskov, and calculated our fuel consumption for the day at 45 mpg - pretty good, and gives us a range of 427.5 miles. Not that we've needed that much anywhere on our route. Our distance today was just over 200 miles, giving us a total so far of 5,800 and, on the shortest route, only about 1,000 to go.

Pskov is an attractive small city, with a historic Kremlin (Class P5, do you know, or can you find out what a Kremlin is?). After the St Petersburg traffic we've decided that this is a better size of city to visit with a vintage car, and enjoyed strolling around the streets, taking in the views along the river.

Tomorrow we have a border crossing and just over 200 miles to do in order to reach Vilnius. The other Austin crossed the border into Estonia today and got through smoothly, only taking 2.5 hours, so we hope to do no worse. They are now planning to miss Vilnius and go straight to Poland, so it seems we will be playing leapfrog across Europe!