Steve was asked by YFC Ukraine to be the sports guy for their English camp in Zhytomyr this year so he said yes. We decided to drive because in our Ukrainian camp experience, the only way to survive is to have a vehicle to go buy food somewhere, ha ha. Also we were weren't sure exactly how we'd get there from Kiev if we took the train - we probably could have taken a train to Zhytomyr from Kiev but didn't really feel like investigating because a road trip sounded like a real adventure.
Last Saturday morning we loaded up our car and headed out on the road headed for Rzhyshchiv where our friends the Crowe family live - it didn't break up the trip super well - seven hours driving on Saturday and only three on Sunday but we wanted to see them again and the boys were really excited to play with their kids.
Garry lent us his GPS promising that we'd never make it there without it and I fully agree! There are NO road signs to lead you through cities, we would have been so lost without the GPS! It was also fun to play with the whole way, ha ha.
Our first stop was for lunch (at McDonald's of course) in Kremenchuk, about three hours into our journey. It was a great place for the boys to run before continuing on.
The highways were lovely past Dnipro but once we got between Dneproderzhynsk and Kremenchuk they were SO BAD. There were points where we wanted to stop and lie down in the craters in the highway to take pictures because they were MASSIVE. I'm 100% sure that Steve at six feet, four inches would easily have fit into many of them! As soon as we hit those roads I was praying for supernatural tire strength and I KNOW that that's ridiculous and it wouldn't have been a big deal to change a tire, but God answered my prayers and we didn't have any problems. There were so many times where I turned to Steve and just said "these are the MAIN HIGHWAYS between major cities!?!?!" It was ridiculous.
Closer to Rzhyshchiv the roads got quite interesting - this HIGHWAY here suddenly turned into concrete slabs with grass growing in the middle as a dividing line.
In one place there were all of these old military vehicles on the side of the road as an outdoor museum so we stopped to take some pictures and of course the boys thought it was really cool.
Lots of highways are these narrow roads through these beautiful tree tunnels. It was so beautiful.
Lots of trees had these big balls in the tops and we weren't quite sure what they were but they were really neat also.
We ordered pizza from the Crowe's cafe and spent the evening visiting.
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