Travel

        Back to Moscow Since I had a couple of extra days to stay in Moscow, with my new train ticket, I had to find a place to stay. My friend Dean at the Povordie Hostel, where I’d stayed before, helped me out again. He got me a reservation to stay there, for two nights, September 6th and 7th, before my return flight. When I got to Moscow, Dean met me at the train station to help me with my baggage. We got the front desk and I checked in. Uh, Oh, Another Check-in Problem It turned …

Read more

Traveling to Crimea After Volgograd, I planned to go to Crimea. I’d taken a plane flight to the capital of Crimea, Simferopol, in 2015. But due to safety concerns (getting shot down by the Ukrainian military), no civilian airplanes are flying to Crimea as of this writing, late September, 2022. So, with the help of Kira, who could pay online for a ticket in advance, I took a train. It’s a sleeper train, with the train cars designed to have upper and lower bunks, about 20 inches wide, and less than 6 feet long. The lower bunk is a lot …

Read more

Part One While I was at a yoga resort in July, my friend Regis Tremblay, a peace activist and documentary filmmaker sent me an email. He’d visited Manita and Yuri, whose hostel I’d stayed at in 2015, in Sevastopol, the famous seaport and naval base, which has been part of Russia since 1783. Manita sent a video message, “We miss you…and remember the garden you promised?”. While there in 2015, I’d seen a patch of land that was unused, and strewn with weeds. So I’d suggested planting fruit trees there. I’d planned to go back in 2020, but Covid prevented …

Read more