Sunday, October 21, 2007
The Ride of a Lifetime!
It was a real adventure heading to Moscow for the Moscow International Air Show. It was also a real adventure traveling from our hotel to Ramenskoye Airfield in Zhukovsky (just outside Moscow).Each day, we piled into our convoy vehicles (busses, vans and an embassy-plated car) and were escorted by two police cars in front and another bringing up the rear during the hour-plus drive during Moscow’s rush hour traffic.
Russian traffic jams are something else. Moscow has more than 13 million inhabitants, and many of them were on the road with us each day. Many of them also seemed to want to own the road, as evident by the many “Saudi Sweeps” that I saw during our travels. For those of you who have not been to Southwest Asia and are unaware of the Saudi Sweep, it’s when drivers sweep across all lanes of traffic to change lanes, cutting off other drivers in the process. I witnessed it occasionally in Kuwait several years ago, but the roads weren’t as congested there as they were in Moscow. Yikes!
The two police cars in front of our convoy had their lights constantly flashing as they aggressively forced other drivers out of our way. Oftentimes, there wasn’t anywhere for the other drivers to move to as they cleared out of the left lane for our convoy, which made it interesting to watch traffic in the other lanes compress to make room for the cars forced out of our way.
When traffic was especially congested, we’d go around the traffic in front of us by moving into the oncoming lanes. Fortunately, we only did so when there were sufficient traffic cops lining the streets to help keep traffic out of our way to ensure our safety.
I got a kick out of how the cops in the cars in front of us used their batons to move traffic out of the lane in front of us.
I was very glad we didn’t have to sit in the miles and miles of traffic en route to the airfield. Our hair-raising escorted ride certainly cut quite a bit of time off our commute!
One day, we counted more than 100 cops lining the streets on our route to the show! I doubt they were all there exclusively for us, but they certainly helped keep us moving along our route.
One day, we had the unfortunate experience of having hot brakes during our ride, which meant we had to stop a while before resuming our travels. Another day, our bus overheated, which necessitated all of us piling onto the other bus for the rest of our travel. Fortunately, we found room along the highway to switch busses in front of a gathering of a handful of police cars.
Another fortunate aspect of our travels was that we were escorted by newer police cars, instead of the Lada variety like this one at the air field. I’m sure our trek would have taken at least twice as long if we’d had to follow the smaller version of the police cars.
I was also very impressed by the techniques the policemen displayed with their batons. They twirled them with such skill and grace. It was almost as if they had to pass a baton-twirling exam before being allowed to don their uniforms.
As hair-raising as our rides were, I’d hate to think how long our drive would have taken each day without our hair-raising police-escorted ride.
