I got up this morning and the mosquitoes weren’t half as bad as the night before. I could be outside with my long sleeved shirt on and work bare handed without being eaten alive. I shook the raindrops off the fly of the tent and crawled back in to work on this blog and plan my route for the day. I took down my tent and thought to myself how again it saved me from the mosquitoes. You go, Eureka! I was going to take some pictures of my bush camping but forgot. I was little ticked off at myself for forgetting. I will be continuing on to Omsk on Highway M51 but must detour near the Kazakhstan border north Ismk/NuNM. I hope the detour is not a killer. I found the detour to be only broken pavement. It was no worse than most of the roads I’ve already driven. I no more than turned north and it rained off and on all day. I was running low on rubles so I drove into the city and what did I spot but an ATM Machine. What luck…………no asking questions or staggering around looking for one. I asked some businessmen who were sitting in an office in the building where the ATM was if they could tell me where to find a hotel. They drew a map and found a driver from somewhere to show me where the hotel was. We arrived there, I shook his hand, and he went on his way. I checked in, and of course the communication barrier checked in along with me. The hotel was right downtown so naturally I asked if they had secure parking and the receptionist said no. I thought for a second, thanked the lady for her trouble and left. I was thinking I will probably be camping again tonight unless I find a hotel along the road. I’ve been watching and the roadside hotels are getting to be fewer. I also notice truck traffic is declining and that’s probably why roadside hotels are getting more sparse. I continued on down the highway 1P402 to OMSK looking for a campsite or a hotel. Good campsites are difficult to find because you want to be out of sight of the highway for security reasons. You never know who might visit you if your tent is visible to the highway. Just when hopes of finding a hotel looks nil, a sign pops up showing a hotel 15 km down the highway. It’s sometimes called the Jesus factor. I drove thru town and missed the hotel. I turned around went back into town and looked around. Sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference between hotels and apartment houses/flats. This town wasn’t much larger than Abbotsford, Wisconsin so finding the hotel shouldn’t be that hard. Well, I drove by it and never saw it. I realized again it’s time to turn around and start another look. I hooked a u-turn and waited for an opening in traffic. While I was waiting a newer black car with all blacked out windows saw me and immediately pulled over and stopped. OK, not a big deal so I pulled into the traffic and he immediately pulled out after me. I didn’t like that so I drove down the road about a quarter mile again and pulled over and stopped. He then knew I didn’t like him. He drove another quarter mile and stopped again. I continued on down the road to a truckstop and café and pulled in. Lots of people around and a bus full of football or soccer kids from Omsk. A lady from the restaurant showed me where the hotel was and I thanked her. I got on my bike and drove over to the hotel and by this time the black car was gone. I checked into the hotel and they had secure parking for the night. The secure parking was in a large garage with roll up doors with huge padlocks 120 yards away from the hotel. Bloody Fort Knox, I tell ya. I unloaded my bike and put all the stuff I wanted into two bags that weighed 60 or 70 pounds and lugged them to the hotel. When I was carrying my bags in from the secure parking building I passed five BMW riders from somewhere. They didn’t acknowledge me so I walked on by and that was the last I saw of them. By the time I had everything in my room my tongue was hanging out, to say nothing about the sweat I worked up. I bought a couple of apples, bananas and a cup of ice cream in a small grocery store they had in the hotel. That was a nice treat. The ladies said I should eat at the restaurant and I declined because of the limited amount of Russian I spoke. I really should have; they probably would have put up with me just to make a few more ruble and of course they don’t see that many Americans. I went to the room and turned on the TV. It took me about a half hour to figure out the remote before I found one station. I flipped thru all 100 stations and found 4 working stations. They had a documentary on about all the deformities of children as a result of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant that went critical and melted down, the effects of radiation from all the nuclear tests in Kazakhstan on pregnant mothers, and the effects of agent orange on the people of Vietnam and all the deformities as a result of that, and of course Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan. The picture they painted was pretty sad. Before that was over I fell asleep and then awoke about 1:00 a.m. when a soft porn movie was playing. Yep folks, right on TV. I watched some of it and fell back asleep.
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