Nearly home now...

All that remains of the Peenumunde (in Germany) rocket testing site is the power station, guard house and the staffs housing (which is now normal housing). The Power station has been converted into a very interesting museum charting the birth of rockets through their use in WW2 to modern day. Outside the museum there are replica models of both the V1 doodlebug and the V2 which looks like it has emerged fresh from a Flash Gordon comic book. There is also one of the trams that used to bring workers to the site that survived the war, the Soviet pillage of equipment after the war and its subsequent use as a tram in a German city and eventually was restored and brought back 'home'. Apart from these relics its hard to picture the beautifully tranquil and picturesque site on a headland at the edge of the baltic as a military test site full of rocket launch pads and soldiers. But it once was and the cemetery near by and the monuments to those who died in the nearby concentration camp which provided slave labour for the camp are poignant reminders of this. The museum documents how the research done here eventually led directly to the moon landings and how many of the scientists who worked here ended up in the USA and Russia continuing their work. A plaque also tells us that more people died creating the rockets than they actually killed largely due to the slave labour involved in thru production.

The weather was still lovely when we left and we headed to a stellplatz on the edge of a lake near Wismar which was idyllic. We cycled around the lake and had a picnic on the beach before visiting another gorgeous German UNESCO town Wismar. The town is another old Hansestic league town and for a lot of its history was Swedish and by chance we arrived as the Swedish Army were capturing the town hall and marching triumphantly through the streets! Another festival we stumbled upon! We had a lovely afternoon watching duals, strolling around the streets and munching snacks of various kinds before getting the bus back to our stellplatz.

Poor Linda hasn't had a bath in 5 months so we made a stop in Bad Salzufen - a Therme - which is famous for its salt works. We spent the afternoon lounging in pools of various salinity and temperature and felt very clean after! There are so many German spa towns that You can even buy a book listing all the Stellplatzs which have a Therme next to them! Linda is keen on getting this and is spending a couple of years going from one to the next. I think more than a couple of baths a year is unnatural.

Our last proper stop was of course Dusseldorf where the Motorhome show was taking place. We found some shipping companies who can ship Taffy almost anywhere - which excited Linda no end! We had a wander around, went for our traditional end of holiday pizza and cycled up and down a bit of the Rhine before the weather began to get uncooperative and we had to put our coats on and the heating too!

We are now in Geldern a town we cycled through on our way out that we thought deserved a better look. We plan to stay here a couple of nights and then make our way gradually back to Calais and home.

Gdansk

What a beautiful city! And as usual, we turn up in the middle of the annual street fair which added to the atmosphere but rather hid the magnificant buildings.

We stayed at a campsite just up the coast arriving mid afternoon and decided to cycle in to the city. Perhaps not the best idea as it was Lindas first cycle since her back problems and it was also 16km away. It was however a lovely ride all on dedicated cycle paths through leafy suburbs and showed us how prosperous this part of Poland is - best get your plumber in now as I can't see them staying in Britain much longer!

The city is an old Hanseatic League town and was once full of majestic buildings covered in decorations and statues displaying the wealth of the city. It was also a free town in 1939 known as Danzig and when Poland refused to give Germany a rail and road link to it was the 'cause' of WW2 with the first shots being fired by the battleship Schleswig Holstein at Westerplatz. Gdansk was a largely German town at the time and during the course of the war was almost completley destroyed which is hard to believe when you see the buildings perfectly rebuilt. When you see Volgograd and other Soviet cities rebuilt after the war it is a real surprise to come to Gdansk and find a lovely old city seemingly unscathed by the war. After a Mexican we cycled back to our camp along the coast where another dedicated cycle path and promenade stretches for miles linking piers and hotels with restaurants and discos. It is done surprisingly tastefully and was our first sight of our last sea of the tour - the Baltic.

We left Gdansk planning to return one day when the fair wasn't on and headed towards the German border stopping at a small farm camp rather than one of the coastal camps that were heaving.

So we are now at a Marina stellplatz about 18km from Peenamunde - the birth place of the space age which we will visit in the morning. Its turning into a war tour holiday this year!

It's unusually hot for the time of year!

Now we are back in the EU we've spent a bit of time catching up with our families and have learned that the weather hasn't been the best back in the UK.

Well, you'd all better brave yourselves as we will be home in a few weeks and with us the heatwave and an Indian summer will arrive!

Since we left Turkey the first time every place we have visited has been exceptionally hot. People have told us so many times "Its unusually hot for the time of year" that we've lost count! And, when we've left an area we've checked the weather forecast and it has almost instantly gone back to normal. Even now as we crawl slowly back through the Baltic states and northern Poland the weather is lovely despite our weather forecasts telling us it will rain!

We must surely be coming to the end of our luck soon but we are now available for bookings for weddings and parties to guarantee lovely weather for any occasion!

We are now near Gdansk and this part of Poland looks very prosperous and pretty. Its a bit like a cross between Germany and Holland. There are dozens of lakes and it seems every house sits on the edge of their own private lake. The towns look nice too, but we haven't really stopped to investigate. We will have to come back here in the future and visit Latvia and Lithuania too as they are gorgeous picturesque countries.

We have stopped for one night at the Wolf's Lair - Hitlers bunker complex near the Russian border which was blown up in 1945. This area of Poland us inundated with bunkers, but Adolf's is the one that everyone seems to visit. It was absolutely heaving with visitors and we got to walk round inside his bunker, or what was left of it, which was a strange feeling. The bunkers are enormous, even after demolition and are hidden in a lovely forest with surprisingly few birds singing but it was a very interesting visit. It also seems to be the turn around point for motorhomes in drives North. We've seen very few motorhomes since leaving Russia but after leaving the bunker there were hundreds of them on the roads. It seems people view the Baltic states as too dangerous to visit still which is a real shame as, from the little we saw, they are gorgeous.

Our only other stop was to see two enormous railway viaducts which cross a gorge in the middle of nowhere. They were built around WW1 and served a sleepy line the equivalent of Onehouse to Stowmarket which only ever had 3 trains a day. First one was built then a few years later another. It is quite odd especially as the line closed a long time a ago and they now lead straight into a wood.

Farewell Russia

We arrived at the border at 11am with about 40 cars infront of us and at 17:30 we got Into the customs area! Russia is surely the king of bureaucratic incompetence. The customs have 5 lanes to clear cars so with the queue probably around 10 miles by the time we got to the front we find they have two lanes open. They make everyone open every door, bonnet and boot and don't touch a thing just stare miserably into the boot. You almost think they expect someone to open their boot and inside will be a large bag with "drugs" written on it! Once you've had your car checked you then go through the passport control who swipe your passport and then stamp your customs declaration and you're done so how this can possibly take 6.5 hours to do for 40 or so cars is beyond me, but hats off to the jobs worths they successfully did! You then get to do a similar process on entering Latvia who obviously go to the Russian school of ineffeciency for training. It really does your head in.

It is very easy to see how, with such glaring ineffeciency, it has taken the Russians so long to get the recent forest fires under control and having used up two full days on our visa just getting in and out of Russia it doesn't make us want to rush back.

Still, we are now plotted up by a lake side on a campsite in Latvia. Yes a campsite, with other vans and caravans, its a lovely setting and very peaceful but to me it feels a bit of an anti climax being back in 'civilisation' it feels like our adventure is over and we are both tempted to just drive like mad and get home. But we are planning on having a couple of days to chill out before deciding what we do and where we go next.

Farewell to Moscow

Like Napolean we left Moscow in smoke a bit earlier than planned. The smoke seemed to have booked in for the next week so we decided we'd leave two days early. We've seen most of what we wanted to and will hopefully get another chance to visit in the future.

So yesterday was our last day in the city and we spent it at the fascinating Museum of the revolution. There's a helpful sheet in English for almost every room and it was really interesting to see how the revolution changed the way of life of the average Russian. We thought it was a bit too rosey eyed view of the past and it was certainly hard to beleive some of the really poor areas we have driven through used to have standards of living that the museum displayed. If they did they must have actively gone out and destroyed all the evidence of the past once communism fell. It reminded me slightly of the intourist Tours from my childhood where everything in the Soviet union was wonderful and everything outside was awful. As a couple of examples, there was a model of a glamourously dressed woman at a restaurant table with a bowl full of pineapples and other fruit and a huge cake described as a normal person eating out. When we came the only fruit you could get - even in the Beriozka shops (tourists only) was not fit for animals let alone posh restaurants. And further on the cause of WW2 was laid at the feet of the west for appeasing Hitler without a word of mention of Molotovs pact with Ribbentrop, the Russian invasion of Poland or Finland. But havings said that it was overall an excellent museum taking you through contemporary Russian history.

And apart from a quick visit to the monastery where we were camped for the last 9 days this morning, that was Moscow! We left late morning and said farewell to the french caravans that had turned up the day before and then drove 300km and we are still in the smoke! Its much clearer but there is still a very noticeable haze but fortunately no smell.

We've loved Moscow, it is truely beautiful city and we are sad to leave it but as for the people, we won't miss most of them at all. Nearly all the Russians we've met here in the service industry are miserable, rude and grumpy. There are a few exceptions of course but generally anyone in the service industry not employed by an American company seems to go out of their way to be obnoxious. We were told this was a left over from Soviet times, but shop staff, cafés, restaurants, museums, transport staff, police almost everyone we've had contact with is grumpy and rude. Even our hotel this morning when checking out was so rude Linda nearly hit the girl! And that is at a Christian hotel - peace, love, understanding and �@~#! off and don't come back!

This is really odd as ALL the Russians without exception we have met outside Russia have been extremely helpful kind and generally lovely people. Perhaps it was the smog?

Lenin blinked!

When we came here in 1972 we went to see Lenin and I thought he blinked! Well this time he looked pretty wooden to me but Linda reckoned he blinked, and we both got told off for talking! We've had a few days of good clear skies and a few days of haze and then one of smoke. On the good days we've managed to get round pretty much everything we wanted to see, the Kremlin and its churches which were fantastic, the armoury with an excellent audio guide and some amazing jewel studded treasures, faberge eggs stunning bibles and silver and goldware that would make either of my sisters in law green with envy! It really was an excellent museum and the value of the objects on display must be astronomical! When you see all these things it makes you have a great deal of sympathy with the revolutionaries. We've been hopping on and off the metro to gawp at numerous stations and there extremely impressive architecture. It is a wonderful underground museum in its own right but the fact that it is so efficient is a tribute to its design under the Soviet era.

St Basils was a real surprise for us as it is in fact numerous little churches in each dome and one larger (but still tiny) church in the middle with a small coridor linking them all together around the central church.

We've had afternoon tea (well a drink and a cake) at some nice cafés but the highlight was the Pushkin cafe which was like having tea at Versailles -and delicious too - but the adjacent pushkin restaurant made the cafe look like wimpys. It was an incredible place with everything covered In gold and the staff in period costume.

There are churches at every turn here and a number of monasteries too. Some are being renovated and these are very intreating as you get to see a before and after and can imagine them in Soviet times.

The All Russia Exhibition Centre was a huge show ground built for agricultural fairs in the 30s and 40s. It is something like the Worlds Fair at Ally Pally with a pavillion built for each republic showcasing their produce. The pavillions are in a variety of styles and must have been some sight in their heyday. The buildings remain impressive but they and the gardens are full of funfair stalls and small stalls selling all sorts of stuff. The hammer and sickle look down on the Panasonic logo and its actually quite sad. To walk up the steps in front of the gargantuan central temple like building and then enter it only to find you are in Blackpool tower surrounded by tacky stalls is a real let down. We loved the buildings and the enormous fountains and statues but felt the park deserved a better fate. We did though in true communist leader style enjoy being biked around the park in a rickshaw. The Ferris wheel in the park is 73m high - that's big - and we thought it would give us a great view over the park. Perhaps it would have done but as we both hung on for dear life with our eyes closed we will never know! The seats for the wheel were completely open and your feet dangled into oblivion.

The cosmonaut museum has very cleverly been built under a wonderful statue of a rocket streaking into the sky. It was built after the monument and houses all sorts of capsules from missions and models etc. Very intersting but all in Russian.

And then there was the day of smoke. We had a good plan for this, we will visit stations and museums. First up Tolstoy - closed for technical reasons, then onto the ice sculpture exhibition - closed for work, onto a station- closed on this line so we had to retrace our steps and get to it on another line. By then we had headaches from the smoke even though we had masks and couldn't face going to the Sakharov museum so headed back to the safety of Taffy and our heath Robinson air purification system we had rigged up which amazingly is pretty effective with the van no longer smelling of smoke! One amusing scene today was of someone taking their mask off to have a cigarette! Bizarre.

Can you see Mos..cough anywhere?

On our drive up from Volgograd we saw quite a few fields with stubble burning in progress. Some fields had got out of control and burned nearby trees and hedges and one field - not a stubble burn just waste ground - was ablaze right next to a petrol station. The flames were literally within inches of the forecourt and the Russians were happily filling up taking no notice! We didn't see any foray fires and all the crops in the 1000km drive looked very healthy.

The foray fires outside Moscow though have been getting worse and this morning we got an email from the British Embassy in Moscow saying a state of emergency had been declard in the Moscow region and warning us about the smoke. Not that you need an email to notice the smoke, the van smells like we've had one hell of a bonfire in here and it is hazy even iinside.

Outside the church bell tower about 100m away is barely visible. There is little wind and Linda has been taking her inhalers as a precaution. Your eyes sting slightly and your throat gets sore. The trouble with the smoke is it comes and goes, yesterday it was a blue sky baking got day but the evening before it suddenly became Smokey in a couple of hours. Today it is really bad and if it stays like this tomorrow we will probably head off. Today we're staying indoors as much as we can and visiting museums and stations - though even they have smoke in them.

Moscow

Our campsite In Moscow is at the Danilevski Hotel 2 stops on the metro from the Kremlin and in the grounds of the Danilevski Monastery which is the Vatican of the Russian Orthodox Church. It is very quiet - no loud music is allowed here - and the hotel has pictures of bearded priests on almost every wall. We overlook the gardens and one of the churches here, it really is a perfect spot! it can only be booked through Perestroika Tours in advance of arrival and we are very pleased we did this. Its also about 300m from the metro and a western style supermarket which makes you realise why Moscow is the most expensive city in the world when you find crisps and loaves of bread for £5 a pack and All Bran for £10 not to mention the £2000 bottle of vodka!

We've now been in Moscow for 3 nights and are relieved we've allowed ourselves 10 days here. It is very hot - unusually so we are told, and there is an awful lot to see and do. We've so far been to a museum workshop to see some modern sculptures by Alexander Burganov which was very interesting though we were the only people there. We've visited GUM which wasn't at all like it was when I came here with my parents in 1972 now being full of designer shops and boutiques with surprisingly few customers. It is still a beautiful building, or more precisely 4 long narrow 4 story buildings running parallel to each other covered with a beautiful arched glass roof.

One thing I remember with affection from my childhood visit was the drinks machines on Red Square. These were very popular with Russians and had a glass which you washed out and then put into a little hole, inserted a coin and a fizzy drink was dispensed. You drank it then washed your glass and put it on top of the machine for the next customer. Rather unsurprisingly these are no longer here but GUM has little carts serving fizzy flavoured water which we told was the same. There is now a choice of flavours (all mixed like a sodastream) from bar like optics and each flavour is in a different primary colour. I went for green which we were told was the original flavour (though I can't remember the colour from my visit) and it did indeed taste like the drink I remember! Linda wasn't impressed, though I suspect this had more to do with the colour and the fact that in her mind anything coming from an optic should by rights be alcoholic.

Its been a festival day on Monday celebrating the parachute divisions and Moscow was crowded with ex-soldiers dressed in blue and white striped vests, that often failed to cover their beer bellies and their berets waving flags and in various states of inebriation from tipsy to completely drunk. They've not been any problem to the tourists but the soldiers at the eternal flame had to point their guns at them to get them to climb down from the monument and the police have looked extremely intimidated, especially the group of police who challneged a small group of raucous soldiers who promptly produced a Kalashnikov! It's actually quite fun to watch as the police usually have an arrogant swagger and look at times a bit SS like in their high peaked caps but we decided we'd not be in the city for the evening as even by mid morning some of the parachutists were wanting to take on the armed soldiers in fights. We instead headed off to the sanctuary of the Cathedral of Christ our Saviour, a rebuilt copy of the original blown up by Stalin in 1931 to make way for the Palace of the soviets. The palace was started but war saw work stop and it never recommenced eventually being turned into the largest outdoor swimming pool in the world. The palace would have been 400m high with a 100m statue of Lenin on top and gigantic. Its small hall would hold 6000 and the large one 25000! It is ironic that all of the stalinist skyscrapers that were built around the city - they resemble the building in ghostbusters - now face the new cathedral and not Lenin! The church itself is masive and has a large gold dome in its centre. Its based on the Hagia Sophia and inside its use of gold is breathtaking. Underneath the churcb is another huge church again with plenty of gold but more frescos on the walls and ceilings.

In front of the cathedral is a new pedestrian bridge that crosses the river Moskva and is a favourite place for wedding photos with the cathedral in front of you and the Kremlin to your right. Weddings move from here Further up river toward the Kremlin and another foot bridge which is lined with small metal trees. These trees are bare branches with no foliage just hooks through the branches where couples place a padlock with their names and wedding date on as the leaves. The trees look wonderful with the multitude of shapes colours and sizes of padlocks on them and there are about 20 trees in all.

We've also been for our obligatory Indian where we were told that corruption here is still a significant problem but the Mafia has all but vanished. We've been to the Red October Chocolate factory which is now a complex of bars apartments And restaurants with sadly not a chocolate to be found anywhere and walked for miles and miles gazing at the architecture everywhere. We've seen the enormous statue of Peter the Great hanging on to the rigging of a ship Peter Pan style (which we thought was Columbus at first) and visited numerous churches. And of course there is the metro, a fabulous monument in its own right it is functional and beautiful too with numerous stations being worth a visit for the statues, stained glass windows, chandeliers, mosaics or the grand patriotic themes. Our journeys are often broken by us having to hop on and off at a station for a quick look around before continuing on our way! We've only been here 4 nights and have another 5 to go but we already feel we need more time here to do everything!