On July 3 we started our next late (9 pm – 3 am) shift, and I’d been looking forward to it for getting out of the heat of the last couple of days. Although the scenery remained pretty much unchanged: wide open pastures, some rolling hills and occasional forests, it was nice to enjoy an evening in the Russian countryside. At approximately 10:50 pm we crossed into Siberia – I picked up a small rock from a field along the roadside to have a little trinket remembering this moment. Shortly thereafter I run my first 10 miles into Siberia, it was pleasant with the sun setting behind me in the distance. Afterwards we drove to Yekaterinburg, and at about 5:30 am checked in at the Iset hotel. Fortunately, a neighboring outside bar was still open and we enjoyed a few beers before breakfast.

Yekaterinburg (the former Sverdlovsk) is one of the major cities in Russia, and has quite a colorful history. The town on the river Iset was founded in 1723 as an industry and military center and an important stronghold of Peter I for colonizing the Ural and Siberia. The town was originally named after Yekaterina, the wife of Peter the Great, but renamed to Sverdlovsk in the 1920ties, after one of the revolutionary leaders. Historically, the city is probably best known for the destiny of the last Russian Tsar, Nikolas II and his family who where imprisoned there in 1917. The whole family was executed in 1918 when the White Guards (the counter revolutionary guards) were closing in on the city, which was held by the Red Army. Under the Soviet Union the city grew to a major center for military, technology and research, and after the war it was even closed to foreigners for years. A few other historical incidents took place here, like the shooting down of a US military spy plane in 1960, and the infamous Anthrax incident where several hundred people died from exposure in a research facility. The original name was returned to the city in 1992.

You have probably noticed by now that I find some of the historical tidbits quite fascinating. To actually get to see some of those places I learned about in school so many years ago is pretty exciting. Already several times before I have intentionally traveled to places I had learned about by some way, either remembering them from my history books, novels or even movies. You are probably also noticing that there don’t seem to be too many exciting things happening on the road right now – and that is probably so, at least from my point of prospective. Well, here are some of the “highlights” on the road.

On July 4th – Paul was celebrating his wedding anniversary, and on that day we also crossed from Europe into Asia. Our first 65 km of road coverage in Asia was quite pleasant, I only run 65 min on that day. The interesting part happened afterwards when we reached our “hotel” for the night. Of course, outside of the bigger cities the expectations are a bit lower to find something “reasonable”. However, the place we (kind of…) spent part of the night on that day was pretty dismal. When we arrived at the dormitory – style place, no free rooms were available, and we had to spread out and get in with other people already sleeping there in various rooms (at about 5 am!!!). I picked a read winner: the room was hot, the air smelled of a mixture of smoke and dry toilet, and my (unknown…) “room mate” was snoring so heavy that my ear plugs were rendered useless. So, just a few hours later at about 9 am we all struggled back out to and had some very marginal food at a local cantina. Back at the hotel we tried to get a bit more rest, but gave up pretty quickly and left for our 9 pm exchange point before 3 pm for what was going to be a long light out. Over the next couple of hours we got ourselves back together with some tea and snacks at a roadside café, and went on to our nightshift. I started my shift outside of a small village and had a rather pleasant run over the 10.8 miles I covered that night en route to the city of Tyumen. As a pleasant surprise, both Laurel and me got some attention from a local TV station who followed us along for a while and also covered the baton exchange. Later that night I went for a little walk through the country side. The lights of our police escort had faded away in the distance, and I enjoyed walking by myself in the semi darkness of the night, an orange half moon was glowing in the sky. The night was clear and calm, there were only a few sounds and the air war filled with a breeze of wild chamomile. I have always enjoyed those few quite hours just before dawn, it sometime feels as if the whole universe has taken a few moments off before everything starts all over again.

The rest of the night was rather uneventful, and after our drive back to Tyumen we finally enjoyed a nice breakfast, a shower … and a beer. Tyumen is actually a modern and very nice city. It owes its wealth mainly to the administrative centers of the Russian oil industries, and the living standard here is second only to Moscow. Of course, there was not much time to further explore the city since we had one more night shift to go before our next rest day in Omsk – the next bigger city on our way to the east. After finishing our shift and resting up for a few hours in a smaller town we spent most of our rest day in the van – driving the 320 km on partly pretty bumpy roads to Omsk. The town itself is quite interesting, it is very spread out with some major industrial suburbs, and everything else that comes with it. The city is located on the Irtysh river, another one of the big rivers in Russia. Although we were in need of some rest, it was a Saturday night, and we decided this time we had to get out into town. And so we did – and we did it good. It is now almost 6 pm on Sunday and we need to get ready for the 3 am shift. My head is still hurting and Paul only got up once for a few minutes so far, next time I’ll elaborate on our night out in Omsk a bit more.