Sunday, November 30, 2008

First summer holidays ideas

Do you remember the idea of making a trip around the Baltic Sea I mentioned over two years ago? This idea came up again. ;) I spoke with Tomek the other day and we thought that driving around the sea with two campers is a great way to spend summer holidays.

With two campers as Tomek is about to buy his own camper built on VW T3 (T25 / Vanagon). :)

The idea to drive over 7,000 km is a bit tricky. It's not like there are no roads and no repairs shops, but it'd be really expensive if something would go wrong and would need repairing. To save the money we'd have to take as much stuff as possible, with the three week supply of food being the last thing to worry about. An axle or two, two spare wheels each, fuel hoses, some wires, a small genset and a welding machine. And many nuts and bolts of various shapes and sizes. ;)

We decided to plan the trip for 17-19 days and spend an entire 3 weeks in the trip. So we would have two or more extra days in case anything went wrong. Of course we'll prepare some backup plans so we could get home sooner by a ferry of some sort.

The trip would be a bit more difficult because at the end of the february my wife should give a birth to my daughter (son?). The kid will of course come with us, but we'll have to take his needs into account. ;)

Sunday, November 16, 2008

The quest for the lost motorway

I live in Żyrardów -- a town located about 25 miles west from Warsaw. Near my town one can find small parts of an old (lost) motorway -- Olimpijka. It was supposed to be built for 1980 Olympic Games in Moscow and to connect Moscow and Berlin. But only small part was finished, only about 50 km, now a part of the A2 highway. The rest of this highway at the moment consists of some bridges, partially built overpasses and 250 yards of tarmac. I always liked such places, so we tried to find as many as possible.

We started over a year ago, in april/may 2007. The first thing we found was that tarmac, followed with mud road cut in a forest and a overpass.



The road in the forest doesn't look spectacular.



I also made a movie of the tarmac. Here it is:



We found two more interesting spots on last sunday. I should probably say that we found them earlier on satellite photos and simply drove there using the GPS coordinates.

From Volkswagen Transporter T3




This was supposed to be an overpass of the highway above planned railway track. Eventually the highway was not built, nor was the track.

We also visited a concrete bridge built over a small creak. Nothing very spectacular.



You can find more photos in my picasa web album.

If you'd like to visit those places, I can provide you with the GPS coordinates. Just write a comment here. :)

Sunday, November 2, 2008

Ania's driving

This is the second time ever when my wife Ania decided to drive my camper. We're going to meet my parents in Warsaw and to buy some cheap diesel fuel.