Thursday, August 4, 2011

And so it begins.


My Peace Corps (PC) service in beautiful Bulgaria has come to an end. The time has come for the post PC obligatory travel stint, and I want to use this page to keep my amazing friends and family informed as to what we're up to, should anyone decide to meet us along the way.

While I've been mentally preparing for this trip since before PC, Jesse and I have been training for the last several months to physically prepare ourselves for a rock-climbing trip across half the world. The idea was to fly into Helsinki from Sofia, and from there take trains across Russia, Mongolia, China and beyond. Along the way, we'll be eating new food, learning new languages, and making new friends while using our 60m rope to access whichever local or world-class crags we can track down.

We've actually already flown from Sofia to Helskinki on the 30th of July as a team of four. After our first couch surfing experience in the amazingly blond country of Finland, Jesse and I split off from the team and headed east. Good luck in Finland, guys!

We crossed the Russian border at about 1 am on July 1st, and since then we've been in Saint Petersburg. I don't have time to write about all of the things we've been up to, so I will be posting pictures along the way for anyone interested in following our route.

While wandering the city, we got our hands on a guide book for rock climbing in Northern Russia. Though the whole thing is written in Russian, we're excited enough by what it says that we've delayed our trip to Moscow. Instead, tomorrow we're taking the 8:30 am train north to Кузнечное(kooznyechnaye), and then hiking off into the Russian forest to find a grouping of lakes surrounded by rock. Tentative plans are to be there for 5 days. If anyone wants to get in touch, our Kindles will keep us connected (possibly).

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