This morning we returned from a getaway in the Carpathian Mountains. It was a spur of the moment trip that we both felt we needed and both found relaxing and enjoyable.We took the train and that is what I will focus on in this blog. I went to the ticket office wanting to buy tickets on two overnight trains (the Donetsk--Kiev and the Kiev--Ivano-Frankovsk trains). As I was standing in line for the tickets I glanced at the schedule and noticed a train that went “direct.” There were words I didn’t know in the information column, so I asked a lady next to me in line what they meant. I took her explanation to mean that it only went every other day, which was fine and I bought the direct tickets in a rather excited state.
I returned home and I was proudly showing my find to Laura, when we noticed something interesting. The train left on the 5th and got in on the 7th. Instead of the anticipated 17-hour trip, we had 41 hours to look forward to. For perspective, Ukraine is about the size of Texas and the trip from Donetsk to I-F is a bit longer than traveling from Houston to Amarillo. How could such a trip take so long? Several times the train left the stations traveling back in the direction of wherever it came from. This morning I looked at a map and tried to remember the cities we went through, but it doesn’t really make sense as to how or why we went to some of the cities. We did a lot of backtracking.
We got in to I-F on Tuesday morning and, even though we were rather greasy and groggy, we had both enjoyed the train ride. We had played cards, read, done word find/crossword puzzles, and slept a lot. But I guess I was in no state to be buying our return tickets. We were trying to decide whether to begin our return on the 9th or 10th. We had tentatively decided the latter (depending on ticket availability) but for some reason, when I was talking to the ticket lady, I bought tickets for the 11th.
In Ukraine, there are three classes of tickets: lux, kupay, and plotscar. Normally we try to travel middle class, but there were no tickets left in this class, so we traveled back plotscar on the two overnight trains (the “indirect” route) and spent a day in Kiev in between. Surprisingly, both rides were rather enjoyable.
The most amazing thing (to my mathematical mind) is that the two of us cumulatively spent 132 hours on the train and paid less than $60. That is economy travel, even if we didn’t cover much ground.
Dave
