We awoke at 6am having gone to bed at 3am after celebrating with Svetlana the start of our trip.
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My alarm clock woke me at 6am. Xavier was late because his clock was set to French time! After bath and breakfast we put on our special suits. Before we left, according to Russian tradition, we sat down on a divan with my family for a few minutes.
We left my garage at 8.15am.
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Since roads were full of cars on E30 at this time, we decided to detour onto Rublevskoe road. Each morning our President uses this same route to go from home to work. Nobody stopped us, but we noticed police preparing for Mr. Putin’s escort. Using the Moscow circle auto road we drove to Mojaiskoe highway (E30 road) and began the trip.
On MCAR road we drove at 80km/hr. Everybody looked at us! The following are km from Moscow:
45km: Xavier cleaning helmet.
80 km: Mirror repairing
120 km: Restaurant stop for dinner at a small house. Here I put on additional trousers.
161 km: Fish market. Xavier bought 3 fish and took lots of photos. When the Russian sales ladies understood that he was from Paris, they wanted to take lots of photos with him.
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198 km: Village photos: old woman, 3 chickens, boy who is making “shashlyk”.
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217km: Petrol stop. Xavier spent about 30 minutes with the gasoline can. I became very impatient with him since he kept manipulating the can by removing and replacing it under the gas nozzle.
245km: First big problem: The camber was flat so we stopped to repair it. We had no experience with removing the back wheel of our motorcycle. I, the Russian, proposed using crude instruments for this procedure like a sledgehammer. Xavier, the Frenchman, proposed handkerchiefs to clean some spare parts. We became annoyed with each other not knowing exactly what to do, but finally we made some repairs and kept on driving.
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297 km: Moscow time is 7pm. Motel stop. After putting our stuff into
the room we tried again to repair the camber. Unfortunately the glue we
have for repairs is bad. We tried using instruments we had but damaged
the camber so the tire would not hold air. The problem was solved after
meeting a young man who sold us what we needed. Returning to our room,
I noticed some guys with girls arriving at this motel. Later, I saw some
girls looking for “clients” in the corridors of our motel! Feeling tired,
we ate the fish we bought from the fish market, and went to sleep. Today
I napped several times as we rode due to lack of sleep last night. Xavier
had to warn me to be more careful and not fall asleep.
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