Today was a good day. I clocked up over 800km without having to really push all that hard.
I set off from Vladim's house around 6:30. The family's hospitality continued firstly with breakfast, then gifts of food for the road and lastly Vitality lead me out to the highway.
Mostly the roads were good and I averaged around 70km/h until it warmed up. The car seems to be oversensitive to ambient temperature. Most of the time it runs between 68° and 82°C but today it was impossible to keep below 90°when the fan comes on. This lasted about 40km until the outside temperature dropped a few degrees. Then the car returned to the lows 80's.
I am using TomTom navigation on my Google tablet computer. Mostly it gives the best route. Sometimes I choose to trust it and others I don't. In the morning I didn't and found myself on the old road but as this looped back to the new road, I kept going. It took me to rail crossing. These are nearly all manned with a little hut where presumably someone pushes a button to activate the gates. The gate are a normal boom but also plates in the road that lift up to prevent you driving into the boom. Anyway, as I approached the lights came on and the boom came down so I stopped, turned off and got ready for a long wait, after all I couldn't even see the train yet. Moments later however, the truck behind me gave a polite hoot. The boom was up and lights off. I figure the man in the hut wanted a better look at the car.
I bypassed Novosibirsk and headed West on an excellent road for about 40km until I found a motel. It is situated next to a river and seems to be frequented by anglers It was a little more expensive at $30 but it was a better room with hot water and two beds to choose from. The mosquitoes certainly liked it.
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