greetings from the geographical centre of russia: novosibirsk.

we will not travel very far today as yesterday we travelled double the distance planned due to the weather.

when we decided to stop and put up the gazebo for a little break, about half an hour later it began to rain. the hail followed immeditely after this and the driving conditions were so bad that even we pulled over at the side of the road with the other drivers to wait for it to ease off. the rain, hail, thunder and lightening coninued for hours and we got drenched when we stoped at the service station for dinner.

we eventually found a set of abandonned buildings at the side of the road with flat enough ground and not too many trees where we were able to set up camp (this has been a problem for us in siberia).

when we got out of the car we found that the strengh of wilma and larry had been tested to the extreme: they were not in a good state. larry has been stripped of some of his paint and wilma has a broken wing mirror. this is a sad day.

however, it is not all bad for wilma as we had both of her slow punctures repaired by a lovely garage who did a great job.

the sighting of an enlish car caused much excitement as it over took us.