Our first blog from abroad! This will just be a short one. We ended up staying up all night on our final night in the UK before our flight to Helsinki. You may remember that we decided to head to Helsinki to take the train to Moscow so that we would enter & exit Russia by train. |
| Don’t forget we hadn’t slept for 24 hours at this point! |
We left at 5am and took the flight, which as you can imagine was pretty uneventful – we both slept the whole way!
On arrival to Helsinki we made our way to the central station by bus and waited in a local restaurant. Well, we thought it was local & it ended up being a Czech restaurant…so we had a traditional Czech lunch instead!
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| Helsinki Train Station |
Our train to Moscow was slightly delayed but when it arrived we were very excited – the start of our long journey across Russia. We had decided to start our journey in a leisurely way which meant we had booked 1stclass for this overnight train – this meant we had a cabin just for the two of us.
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| Our train from Helsinki to Moscow. John has the supplies for the journey! |
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| The train tickets! |
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| Our 1st class cabin |
The experiences started nearly immediately – we received some tea & biscuits from our train attendant and the journey started.
And so, also, started the ritual of passport checking, customs checking and various people hoping for a sale of random goods! As the clock moves forward in Moscow we wanted to head to bed quite quickly – so we tucked ourselves in on each our sides and started to sleep – we were, of course, quite tired so it wasn’t hard to fall asleep.
But suddenly there was a violent tug at the door and the lights were turned on and it became clear that we were about to cross the Russian border – we were so tired it felt like torture! We were scrutinised by the passport control and then another lady came to the door and shouted “LIFT!” and we had to get out of bed and lift our mattresses to show we weren’t smuggling any aliens into the country. We passed and were left alone for the night.
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Day No.
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Day
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Date
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Countries travelled
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Country
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City
|
City
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Trans-port
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Kilometres travelled
|
Kilometres total
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Hours travelled
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Night accommodation
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|
1
|
Wed
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13/02/2013
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1
|
Finland
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1
|
Helsinki
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Plane
|
1840
|
1840
|
4
|
Train
|
