we have made it to russia!
we are currently using the internet in a post office in shack, just out side moscow.

the night before we crossed the border we slept next to a dusty road with lots of lovely horses int the next door field. we slept close to the border so that daddy could wake us up at 05:00 (at time i have become all too familiar with) to get to the border early. despite this, there was still a large queue when we arrived.

it took us 8 hours to cross the border from lativa. the exciting bits of that were: tessie getting her passport inspected for being foregin, me filling in a form incorrectly and the trailer needing a passport. we started queueing for the border at 06:00 and cleared it at 14:00.

after clearing the border we asked some locals it we could camp at the end of their land; they were extremely friendly and they even helped us put up our tent amoungst the mosquitos (this may have been because we inadvertenly asked them to).

yesterday we visited moscow. it took us the longest time to find the kremlin and we asked some locals for our first directions. we have been using our phrase book quite a bit and now appear practically native. during the evening we stopped at our first knife adn fork (motorway service station with food) to wait for the rain to abate and there had been a massive storm for quite a while now. later that even the rain did easy off a bit but it then came back with a vengence and there was an amazing lighteneing storm. the rain was so heavy that we could not see the lines on the ground of the motorway. because of this we had to sleep int he car at the service station and daddy drove off again at 01:00. this was not good for daddy but meant that the day's driving was done by 10:00.

going to look at some sights now as we have come accross an english speaking russian.