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This morning when we woke up it had rained! We believe we are past the worst heat, and it was a pleasant 27 degrees when we started climbing the Urals. Green Car faithfully and silently drove up kilometer-long hills and rolled down with 120 km/h, or as fast as we dared, our only worry knocking the battery-box against the humps on the road. Apart from that minor worry driving Green Car is a breeze. The last days we have been lucky finding good charging, perhaps we are getting better at explaining what we need? So Green Car has been fully charged in the mornings. At lunch-time we left the highway to look for charging in Satka. It turned out to be a good move. We found high-amp charging in car-repair shop and had plenty of time to look at Satka, one of the oldest towns in the Urals, a mining-town mixing Soviet concrete blocks and beautiful old log-cabins in the shadow of slag mountains. In the afternoon we stopped at a monument marking the border between Europe and Asia. To celebrate reaching Asia we bought a knife crafted in the nearby famous Zlatoust metalworks. Perhaps the knife can find a spot on the wall in our home, and wait a while to be deposited in our big cupboard with old memories.



Nina and Hjalte

Life on the Russian highways has been hot, dusty and dirty. You have to find the rough beauty and not expect comfort. That said things have improved vastly since we were here twenty years ago. All the new gas-stations with eatable things for sale, a choice in new supermarkets, the truck stops with motels of a sort. All that is new and then the important change:  no more GAI, no more police check-points at ALL towns, no more a country off-limits for foreigners. So now we can sleep in the same cheap hotels as the truckers. Here we can plug in power and sneak the wire

out a window, or get power from a tire-repair shop (our favorite). Traffic is heavy, fast and Hjalte