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The General Lee
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We arrived on Ukraine's Independence Day. After getting off the plane there was mass havoc at customs - too may people and not enough workers. People were all bunched in together, no lines, packed in from front to back - at one point the police (or maybe military showed up) we meet some people from our boat and tried to make the best of it while others were getting, shall we say grumpy... one guy who started off swearing and complaining in the back politely lost it, I say politely because he apologized while he pushed his way to the front saying he "had to" he claimed he had another flight he had to catch tonight (um, hello, plenty of time if his fight was tonight) whatever, it was probably better he was gone anyway. Once we got through we found all our bags and the last part where you clear customs and declare stuff was by-passed. The poor customs control guy at the scanner was just waving people through to get us all out of the area. I guess too many agitated, hot, tired foreigners for him! Alla (one of our guides for the tour) quickly rounded us all up and got us and our luggage to the bus (we later came to know this was English speaking bus #1 - there was a total of 3 buses following us on our journey). Alla explained that she had never seen it like this before in all her years of doing this. She came through collected our passports and cruise tickets (some people were concerned about hading over their passports - I thought it was great, I wouldn't have to worry about loosing it or having it stolen while it was locked away in their safe).
She explained to us that when we got to the boat our luggage would be brought to our rooms. In our rooms our keys would be in our doors and in our cabins we would find our trip "passports" they were basically the size of a business card with our name, cabin number, bus number, and dining room on it. You had to turn your key when you were leaving the boat and then they would give you your card, when you got back they took your card and gave you your key. Sounded like this was their system to make sure they had everyone - it reminded me of that movie where those two scuba divers were left at sea because the boat didn't realize they were missing anyone. The rooms we were in (we all had singles so we could have our own space and not kill each other during the course of our trip) were nice there was a small bathroom with a sink, toilet, and shower in probably a 3x5 space - it was actually bigger than I had expected. There was a single bed along the wall, 2 life vests under the bed, a small square table, another bed folded up along the wall (some people used this as a double), small fridge, a small TV with 3 English speaking channels (CNN, BBC, EuroNews) and a remote with a sleep timer (the menu on the TV was not in English, that was kind of cool - you can believe I still figured out how to set the sleep timer) some cabinets above the tucked away bed and a double closet. It was a comfy room - think dorm room.
We set off to explore before dinner and returned for our briefing and champaign toast at 7pm. We searched out a grocery store (weather shorts/capris and tee shirt weather) along the way the wind picked up and blew dirt and grim into my already dry irritated eyes (duh, I flew the whole trip with my hard, gas-permeable contacts in) I was convinced it was like someone had taken sandpaper over my eyes and I was now blind. We made it into the store and mom saved me - she had a spare contact case in purse. I popped out my contacts over a display of bananas and carried on. We got Coke Light, drinkable 4 pack of yogurt, Ukrainian Vodka, bottled water, what we thought was a bottle each of red and white Ukrainian wine (in my defense, my whole world was blurry), and some cranberry juice. Hmm, lots of liquids!We met John an engineer, (there ended up being a bunch of engineers on this trip) who was traveling by himself and had some great travel tails. He is going for the century club (visiting 100 countries). There did not appear to be many younger travelers with us. Dinner was at 7:30 there was an appetizer (salad type dish), soup, main course, and dessert. There was a menu and most courses had 2 to 3 options to choose from. There were tables of 2, 4, or 6 (they can hold 200 something passengers, maybe 220, but there was only 120 of us, and 100 crew, so they only opened one dining room, but there were two on the boat). John joined us and our 3 become a 4 for the trip- very nice for meals and trips, evened us out. That night we had fireworks for their Independence Day Celebration. Later when we got back to our rooms my bed was turned down and there was the daily liter of bottled water out.
So, in reference to the General Lee - our boat was named after General Lavrinenkov, however, we can't quite manage to figure out how to say his last name so I have dubbed her the General Lee ( I hope Bo and Luke won't mind, she is a worthy vessel).
Where I stayed:
Viking Lavrinenko
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