Road Trip Home

We left the camp at 9:30 Saturday morning because we knew we had a 10 hour drive ahead of us. I always keep my camera handy while we're driving for fun sights like this although I didn't get the horse in the picture: 

The roads were good until we stopped for a gas station lunch in Uman. Now, I'm not talking a truck stop diner....I'm talking microwaved hot dogs.....

.....but they were still pretty good.

Beautiful fields and actually really good roads make for some fast traveling.

An example of passing in Ukraine - even if there's someone coming (that red truck), the person passing drives in the middle of the road, the person being passed (in this case us) moves over to the shoulder and the oncoming vehicle (red truck) also moves over to make room for all three cars on a two-lane highway.

This technique obviously only works when there's a decent shoulder.

And then suddenly the major highway that crosses the entire country turns into gravel for a while:

We followed this white car for a very long time after Kirovograd and it would get very far away from us but we'd always know that the roads were bad up ahead when we caught up to it.....which happened a LOT.

I always feel the need to take pictures of farm machinery.

The last 80+ km before Dnipro were definitely the worst roads we drove on the way home - constantly veering and weaving, slamming on the brakes and praying as we launched over craters....we thanked God countless times because we drove through some ridiculous things and had NO idea how our tires were still attached to the car! We were both hurting though - my neck was hating all the lurching and jerking and gave me a major head- and face-ache. Steve's injured ankle (from soccer 2 weeks ago) was aching because of course - it was the clutch/gas foot and his back was aching from his muscle spasm the week before we even left for camp. We KNEW there was ONE amazing highway around Dnipro and we know the highway between Dnipro and Zap so we knew what to expect and we were just pushing through as hard as we could to get there!

Finally on the home stretch! Zaporozhye Oblast (province).

This is a brand new Zap sign that they scraped Lenin's face off of and made into this:

Driving through all of those other cities and along all those roads made me really realize how much I love Zap! The roads have been repaired, the river/island are beautiful...it's one of those really under-rated places in the country to live! People always say oh ew Zap! Why do you live there?! But now I will defend it a lot more wholeheartedly because I know what else is out there!

And now we're home. You better believe we cranked our a/c and put our mattress directly under it for night last night.....sat under it this morning with a hot cup of coffee....ahhhhh it's good to be home!

All in all - the camp was great. Frustrating at times because of the chaos in the games but that's what happens when you're organizing 101 kids and 20 inexperienced counselors.

The food was probably the best Ukrainian camp food we've ever had - there was so much between meals and two snacks a day that we hardly ate any of the snacks that we brought.

The camp location was pretty nice - newer facilities with decent accommodations but no a/c for us poor Canadians, ha ha. The windows did have screens though so it wasn't like Young Life camp last year where we were sleeping in a sauna but if we opened the windows we were sleeping in a fly den.

We thought the camp was run well - organized with a plan that didn't always work out exactly as hoped but everything worked out in the end. It was probably the best camp we've been to yet.