Church overload in the Golden Ring.
Thursday, May 14th, 2009Today we leave Moscow for the Golden Ring towns. Even though many of the stops along the way are going to be major cities it still feels as though this is the end of the easy part. The further east we push the less chance that anyone other than my two travel partners will speak English, building language skills with a few words of the day does not really begin to encompass the myriad of situations necessary to function on a daily basis. There are a number of planned stops that have only been open to outsiders for fifteen years and while sure to be interesting that fact alone is quite intimidating. Similar to Helsinki the feeling was one of going from the known and manageable into the unknown maybe heightened because the past two weeks had been such a fulfilling time. [read on]