Ostrov. Pskov day one.

Pskov always been an attractive place on the map, somewhere far-far away at the border with Estonia. And because of its remoteness it seemed almost unreachable. But if you travel for 2 nights you could have enough time to get to know the city and you wouldn’t be too tired from driving all the time. We decided to drive through the Rzhev and from there by M9 and E95 roads.

We had our breakfast after Rzhev in the field overlooking the memorial. It was very cold and there were very strong winds. Alex was in bad mood and even didn’t want to take pictures. We also wanted to walk around the memorial to have some activity. But the parking from the Rzhev side was closed and we we forced to just have a quick look at the memorial from the window..

At this point I was in bad mood too. First Alex has worsened my mood by complaining all the time and now we hadn’t a chance to have a walk. Driving calms me down, so i took the driver’s seat and drove all the way till the turn from the excellent M9 road. The weather was making some crazy experiments with water all this time. We’ve never been driving through such rains! Sometimes it looked like you are driving underwater. I wanted to turn wipers mode even faster, but they already worked at their limit and we were scared they could even fly away.

After the turn to the E95 road we stopped for the “green” stop and to change places. While waiting for me, Alex found out that one of our headlights isn’t working. At this point we thought that maybe we should turn back home, because you can’t drive in the darkness with one headlight off. But we decided we have enough time to arrive before darkness and we should drive ahead. We turned parking lights + fog lights and went.

At first it was fun to ride and the weather became better. But then the road construction with reverse traffic started. And there was always red light for us!

We spent a lot of time on those traffic-lights. At least the nature around was beautiful.

Strangely, the golden fall isn’t yet over in Pskov region. There even some places there it isn’t yet started and the trees are green.

Also this part of the region looks like Norway. But very poor. And without roads. But still it has something Norwegian in it.

And in Pskov region they definitely have a good apples harvest this year. There are buckets of apples to sale along the road and here are still growing big and red apples on the trees.

We stopped in Ostrov city for lunch. Of course I choose it because of its name.

Although we didn’t have time left to walk around the city, we had a quick walk through the garden to the island there the fortress used to be.

There are very cool bridges leading to the island.

Overall we had a good impressions of the city even thought we didn’t spend much time here. While we were walking the sun started to shine and it shined and made us happy later while we were driving.

I think it’s because of the closeness to the borders here is a huge military base in Pskov. Even part of the forest near the city is a part of the military zone.

In the end we managed to get to the city before darkness, but alas to the house… It’s exactly today that the global road repairs started and 2 main bridges were closed. The whole traffic in the center of the city was jammed. But we were pleasantly surprised by the culture of driving and by the drivers’ respect to each other on the roads.

After about an hour of driving in circles in traffic jams and constructions we reached our house. The apartment’s owner met us very heartily. And the apartment itself is soulful. We even managed to walk a bit around the evening city and it was beautiful (but we were walking without my camera).