Valday day two.

At night the weather has changed and by the morning the rain was pouring. It left us without our morning run. We had breakfast listening the wind blowing and periodic rain showers, but have decided not to cancel our trip to the Valdaysky national park. Some time ago I’ve read about Valday great trail and desperately wanted to visit it since.

The trail is about 60 km long. There are information boards and camping sites for nights in tents along the way. It’s a dream! But today we just came to look at the trail and walk along it a bit. We parked in the place where this trail crosses the road (a little further from Korotsko village) and from here went on the path. Under the rain.

The path is great and even under the rain it’s comfortable to walk on it. There is a kilometre pole every km. There are boards with interesting information along the way. It’s pure pleasure to have a walk here. The forest is magnificent, the smells are intensified by moisture. And all you can hear is rain.

We’ve went a bit more than 4 km till the Nakhodno lake. It’s beautiful, but you can’t come close to the lake.

Here is the picnic site. Sure it’s cool that there are such places here, but after Norway they seem kind-of sad. And for some reason (according to the information on the board) paid..

From the lake we turned back. Forecast said that the rain should have stopped by now, but in reality it’s just started. The moment we’ve reached the car only our underwear was dry. We’ve changed clothes and boots and headed home.

Even since our trip from Pskov Alex were noticing that the clutch is jerking. I’m not so good with manual cars, so I were’n noticing anything. But now I've sat to drive us home and even I have noticed that there’s something wrong and the car is strangely shaking. So beside the bulb change we have to go to service. We have scheduled a change of tires on Monday, so we'll do both things then.

After Vyshny Volochyok we’ve stopped to have lunch. It’s just stopped raining.

From here Alex were driving. My leg was aching and it wasn’t comfortable to drive. Now I think how good it is that we have switched!

In Tver we went through Gorbatka. We were planning to arrive at home far till the darkness, but we’ve stacked in giant traffic jam. And completely moveless traffic jam. After standing for about 50 minutes in one place we’ve turned around and went by Staritskoye highway. On this road, already in the city, there is a very broken rail crossing and you have to drive extremely carefully and slowly. And at this exact point something went wrong with the clutch. Alex couldn’t switch to any gear at all!

I’ll skip all details of our panic and our attempts to drive again. In the end we were driving through the whole city on the first gear (which we could only turn on after shutting the engine down) with the emergency lights in the darkness with the foglights instead of headlights. You can’t make it up on purpose! It’s unclear how we were able to reach the house and even park in the parking lot. But how good it is that we’ve turned around and went off Gorbatka. And how good it is that we haven’t got in any accidents and that almost all the drivers around were understanding. And how good it is that it was Alex the hero who was driving, and not me!