Monday 18th June - Update on the week

We arrived in Moscow yesterday – a watershed for our journey, as we leave behind the open spaces, mountains, wilderness and hundreds of miles of silver birch forest. We've come across our first McDonalds and Ikea and ahead of us we expect to find better roads but also traffic, which brings its own challenges. The elegance of some Russian cities has been a pleasant surprise, and the colours of Moscow buildings and churches are pleasantly out of step with the images I still held from Cold War era films.

In the last week the roads have been very variable, with some long stretches of dirt track – one of over 20km, which included an hour-long wait for a ferry crossing. The tarmac is not much better, being riddled with potholes between which we have to try to pick a route.

A few days ago, between Perm and Kazan, we hit a vicious ramp at speed. It launched us into the air and when we landed the offside windscreen upright (already cracked) snapped, and the lower pane of glass fractured. I was very glad that Sebastian was driving at the time, as I wouldn’t have wanted to do this to his car! I was also grateful for the laminated safety glass, although it didn’t prevent me from getting a mouthful of sharp splinters. A temporary repair, with tyre levers, cable ties and birch twigs held the screen together as far as Moscow, where the engineers at Oldtimer Garage kindly welded the frame together, free of charge and on a Sunday. Apart from this, the Austin has held up well - a tribute to the many hours of preparation put in by Sebastian and several others who helped.

Our accommodation has been a mix of large Soviet era hotels, small guest houses and, most memorably, staying with a family in the small town of Syumsi, who fired up the sauna at the end of the garden in our honour and fed us bortsch and chicken for breakfast before we were allowed to leave.

The police seem to be losing their sense of humour as we head westwards. In Moscow we have been asked for original documents for the first time – including insurance. Not knowing it was compulsory to carry them, we’d left them in the hotel, and the car was threatened with arrest.

Pic 1 Concours winner - a Cadillac that used to belong to Prince Rainier of Monaco, the Austin dropping oil in the background.


We seem to be minor celebrities, photographed with thousands of mobile phones. On our arrival in Moscow we were whisked to a local ‘Oldtimer’ car event, where we found ourselves an incongruous part of a concours d’elegance – our broken windscreen was certainly not traditional concours material, but speeches were made and people seemed happy to let us drop oil on their red carpet.