Ukraine to Poland

Another coffee dear? After leaving Kharkov we pedaled west across rural Ukraine, helping ourselves to apples and walnuts which line the roads, getting water from village wells ,and kilos of peppers from roadside sellers[everything is sold by the bucket load so we had peppers with everything for 3 days ]until we begun to have a proper appreciation of just how big the Ukraine is. Every day we indulged in a civilized “real”coffee break mid morning….using our Kelly kettle which is good fun [as well as ultra efficient at boiling water].

See if you can find Jon? After looking so wonderful the sunflowers all go through a dismal period of morbid introspection; fields of brown drooping heads. You can’t blame them as they will shortly have their heads cut off, and you truly do not want the J .Bargett lecture on sunflower harvesting techniques.[ which I suspect is not as factually correct as it sounds ].

Just a normal morning. Jon is up making coffee and Nic is still sensibly feigning deep sleep in her snug sleeping bag, in the tent pitched right next to the very meandering Dnister river.

Just normal Pyrotechnics. No wonder we never see any wolves or bears. Every morning and every evening there’s a bit of a “wooooomphf”,and everything is lit up .This is the only bit of stove procedure that Jon enjoys. I suspect him of being over generous with the priming petrol.

Poland. Lots of mountain bike trails in the hilly Polish countryside. Of course we can’t resist them, even when they are a bit technical for panniers, and we don’t know where they are going either.