Winter driving

Thursday night Garry went to play basketball and his drive back to the village was an adventure. Last week Sunday when we drove to church I noticed some sections of road that were drifting with snow, which makes two lanes into one. This is a real problem with the normal traffic, where the extremely fast cars (130-140 plus Km/hour) like to fly past in the passing lane, while the normal 100-110 km/h traffic has to use it to pass the trucks and the old Ladas that cannot drive faster than let's say 80 km. In the last two winters we have seen a number of accidents where cars have run out of road and hit someone else or the very large snowbank that the road turned into.

This is compounded with the poor visibility that comes at night and/or blowing snow, both of which were factors as Garry was driving home. Our Lada's high beams are terrible, they would barely look like very dirty low-beam headlights, and even in the the cities there is very little lighting. You really have to watch carefully for pedestrians at night, since most Ukrainians seem to dress in all black, and even if they are using the crosswalks, they aren't lit. I don't mean that they don't have big flashing lights to tell you someone is crossing, I mean you can't see anything walking across the road, since there is rarely even a lightbulb on the curbside.

Anyway, back to our story. Garry got out on the highway, leaving the city to come home after basketball, and discovered blowing snow. Since he knew that the road had unplowed drifts in places after driving in, he decided to follow a car going a moderate rate in the slow lane. It took much longer to drive home than normal, and of course he found traffic backed up behind one of the snowdrift/lane reduction-caused accidents. He said he could see there were police lights flashing where some vehicle was being loaded up and taken away, but traffic was crossing over on the other side of the highway and around the scene in the dark, with no help from the police, so he followed along. Remember what I say about driving in Ukraine- always watch for what the other cars are doing and be ready to react! Oncoming traffic on your side of the road, just stay in your lane! I am sure the other drivers didn't think anything of it.



Garry said he did see some plows out working on clearing the road as he was driving home, and apparently they really got to work, since the road was decent when we drove to Dnepro on Saturday and Sunday, with at least one a half lanes open in the drifted sections. In this photo you can tell how much snow was on the road before they cleared it from the residue on the road, it looks like there wasn't even one lane to drive in here! At least its cleared now, two years ago the banks stayed once they formed all winter, it was scary even in the daytime, with cars trying to squeeze into the open lane inches from your bumper at high speed, just in front of a snow bank.


Saturday Maxim was busy for two hours helping out the mayor with our tractor, trying to open one of the other roads in the village. We live on Centralna or main street, which is the only street (of three) that normally gets plowed. Maxim said he didn't use the loader, but would drive a ways to break though the drifts and a smaller tractor would plow behind him, and then he would drive forward again. The snow was so hard in the cold weather and wind we have had, nothing could drive through the road.




I took some photos on Saturday, when we drove in to Dnepro to visit an English class, go bowling (Garry had a 169 game, I only broke 100 once in 4 games), buy an electric oil filled heater for our bedroom, and get some groceries.









The road out to the highway is fairly cleared, but getting a little icy as you can see in the photo. Garry says it was easier to avoid the holes in the road right after it snowed, before it was cleared because the cars detoured around them, all you had to do was follow the tracks. It was a little exciting when you met a car, though. There is a bunch of snow at the end of the road where you get on the highway, so you have to get in the right set of tracks going out and coming back in. Everyone goes right on the highway and then crosses to make the U-turn from the left. When the snow falls, they don't clear the loop to go in on the other side- its a big drift so you just turn on the highway- half the cars do it when its clear anyway. It will melt in the spring.






Here is section of highway over that new bypass road they were working on all year- remember it was almost finished at the beginning of December when we went back to Manitoba? It looks a little snowier than our highway, less traffic uses it. Garry says there was a truck stuck in the snow trying to go through the entrance ramp when he drove to the city last week. He also says that he has never seen any of the lights turned on on the standards that were erected here or below on the bypass road. Maybe in the spring?

This -15 to -20 C weather is tough on truck traffic, they stall on the roads because the diesel freezes up while they are running, they don't have the cold weather additives that are in the diesel fuel at home in Canada. You also see some people changing tires on the side of the road in the cold. We had a tire that had a "slow leak" Garry was pumping it up several times a week before they decided to fix it. There were three small nails in it, and one in another. Garry says that lots of people are burning old scrap wood to heat their houses, and dumping the ashes on the road. He says they were very twisted burnt looking little nails that came out of the tires.








How do you like the new method of keeping the hubcaps on the Lada? Garry says the one on the other side looks better, when they fixed the tire Max hid the end of the zipties better on the inside.