Another really painful day with some highlights: The forecast for the whole northwestern part of the Ukraine has been “rain” for as long as they can hope to predict, so we were actually surprised that it was sunny in the morning in Kharkiv. We left the hotel around 9 AM, and rode on pretty decent roads until about 1 PM, by which time we were freezing, so we stopped for lunch at a roadside inn. It was a rustically decorated place with a grumpy barmaid who nonetheless produced some excellent schnitzel. In the parking lot I got to know some Russians hailing from Saratov who took some photos of our bikes, and a cute kitty who apparently was also freezing and decided to curl up on my still warm saddle. When we finished eating it was already starting to rain, and it continued to rain until around 6 PM when we arrived in Kiev, in the middle of rush hour. We got completely lost in the huge city, and the streets were so clogged up in the direction that we wanted to go in that we decided to stop at a Vietnamese restaurant for dinner, where I also changed into dry pants and shoes — my feet were soaked inside my boots. We stayed for about three hours, waiting for the traffic to clear up, and had some delicious Vietnamese food in the mean time. We also made a phone reservation at the Slavutych hotel, and decided to drive there. The plan was that Jerome will follow his GPS and I will follow him, but we got separated and I subsequently became quite lost, arriving at the hotel about 30 minutes after he did. Tomorrow we will try to do some sight seeing despite the bad weather.