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 On the right are some of the many roadside stalls. They normally consist of a small table at the side of the road, bearing whatever is for sale, and the owner sitting a few metres back from it under an umbrella or in a small ramshackle shelter. Most of them today were selling pumpkins in a variety of shapes, sizes and colours. That surprised me because my old Latin teacher said he was once told by a Russian who didn't appreciate the importance of word order in English sentences that "in Russia, pumpkins don't eat people". For most of the morning, I had been riding in heavy rain on roads which didn't give me much space at all. As soon as I entered the Moscow Province, the road suddenly acquired a full-width hard shoulder, which pleased me greatly. At about the same time, the rain stopped for a couple of hours. As usual, the hard shoulder had a number of broken-down vehicles, a number unattended parked vehicles even though there are no buildings nearby, and some slow-moving vehicles which drive there so that other people can overtake them. However, it now also contained fast-moving vehicles which were using it as a way to overtake others. After a few kilometres, I came to the start of this wery slow-moving 7 km traffic jam leading to roadworks on a bridge. The road is only meant to have one lane in each direction but you can see that there are just as many cars on the hard shoulder as in that proper lane. I managed to overtake all of them by riding on the stony muddy strip to the right of the tarmac. At one point, I had to remove both panniers from the bike and carry them one at a time across a steep slippery slope above a drainage channel, which at least gave some entertainment to people stuck in the traffic. Riding on that muddy strip worked for a few kilometres, then cars started driving there too. More remarkably, some people tried to sneak past the queue by reversing the whole way along the opposite hard shoulder. Often, a car doing that would be closely pursued by another car taking the opportunity to sneak through going forwards, so they gave the impression of two cars having a head-to-head confrontation with one of them backing away rapidly. There was some similarly creative driving later as I approached Moscow and the traffic got heavier. At one point, I found myself riding two lanes to the right of where the tarmac actually stopped. UTC Time: 10:52, Sunday 11 September 2011 Local Time: 14:52, Sunday 11 September 2011 Estimate of longitude: 37° 2' 15.83" E = 37.037730° Estimate of latitude: 55° 14' 12.34" N = 55.236760° Possible error on position estimate: 50 metres | |