Lviv

By roychinnorNo Comments
I woke somewhat earlier than normal this morning startled by the wailing of the Air Raid Siren. Still bleary-eyed my first thought was “it’s a practise” followed by “What? At five o’clock in the morning”. As a post war baby, I can remember the sirens being tested every so often in the early fifties and we always waited for the short ‘all clear’ blast following. Do they sound an ‘all clear’ here, are we supposed to get out of bed and go somewhere? Oh, to hell with all that, I’m going back to sleep. But I defy anyone not to continue listening for the sound of an aircraft, or roar of an incoming missile, for a few minutes at least. I saw later in the news today that in fact Odessa was hit by two missiles with another two destroyed. If they were fired from a ship in the Black Sea the trajectory would have crossed us among many other towns...
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Ivano-Frankivsk

By roychinnorNo Comments
Over breakfast at The Frontier Hotel I met the owner is a Maltese gentleman and who at the age of 19 bought a brand new MG Midget as his first car. He was thrilled to see Bridget and learn what we are doing, albeit he questioned the wisdom of visiting some locations. We left the hotel at 08:30 and drove, without incident, the 500 metres to the border. The queue was not too long and in total it took less than an hour to negotiate Customs and Passport control for exiting Romania and entering The Ukraine. However, it took another twenty minutes to purchase a green card for Bridget. I had no local currency to pay for the card and the only ATM at the border was broken! Eventually, the broker and I came to an understanding, I only had 20€, so he would charge me 20€. As we left the border the queue of cars and charity workers waiting to cross...
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Ukraine

Ukraine

By roychinnorNo Comments
The drive from Chisinau up to Siret was a nightmare, but as with any disaster film there was a hero. The journey started out well, leaving at around 8:30am in light traffic. The route out of the city, so often the worst part of any driving day, was easy to find and follow. I decided I would wait until we had cleared the city boundaries before topping up with fuel. The first couple of service stations I tried didn’t know whether their fuel’s content had 5% or 10% (E5 or E10) ethanol and to be perfectly honest I don’t think they even knew what Ethanol is. Eventually I found a garage around 15 miles out of town that had E5 fuel, so we filled up. Most of the East European countries still have pump attendants and there is usually a scramble for who is going to do the honours. I’ve even had the situation where one attendant would fill the fuel...
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Moldova

By roychinnorNo Comments
Before I start with my first impressions of Moldova here are some passing observations on the Western area of Romania which I drove through driving from Constanta on the Black Sea coast up to Oancea on the Moldovan Border. A vast part of west Romania has no mountains, like those I had become accustomed too, but is a plain. Much of the drive was spent gazing across landscape at the same level as myself, but unusually I could see all the way to the horizon. At times the view was blocked by the wheat and maize growing right up to the roadside, but at other times the full landscape was visible and you could even identify the meandering rivers by the corridors of reeds. During the morning (it was Sunday) many villagers were returning home from the church morning service. There were occasional individuals, but more often couples strolling and chatting. Most notable were the many pairs of female friends together, clearly...
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Constanta

By roychinnorNo Comments
Forty-five years ago, 1977, my MG Midget was produced in Abingdon and I took my wife and children on a holiday to Constanta, Romania. I have just spent the past day and a half revisiting and walking around Constanta and it is a very different place. In the late seventies, the “Iron Curtain” countries started to open up to western tourists. The Black Sea coast has some great beaches and the great tsunami of tourists, flocking to Spanish resorts, had peaked and were eager to try new locations. Our holiday was booked for June/July period, I don’t remember the exact dates, and we had an anxious period after a seriously bad earthquake in the January that had affected a large area of the country. However, we were told it was fine to go ahead and so landed in the first Communist governed country we had been too. My memories of Constanta from then are of drab concrete block buildings, gangs of women...
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