To wait or not to wait…

There is no question.

So it appears it works like this: you arrive at Narva, estonian border at about 2pm. Despite knowing we won’t get through, we head straight for the border just to have a look. Not much to look at, and not many friendly looks.

“Back.”

So back we go, as we knew we would have to. We didn’t realise quite how long it would take to get on any further…

Next, you have to find at scrap yard. Well it looks like a scrap yard.

You have to queue to get into the scrap yard, even if you arrive in a 72 wheeled convoy, and stopping to get into the scrap yard means you bring a major highway to a halt. On entry to the scrap yard you have to produce any and all documents you have (one of which has to be your V5) and eventually you get a small metal token.

The small metal token allows you to enter the scrap yard, free up the motorway, and join the REAL queue.

Of course this isn’t obvious at first. There’s a lot of headless chickening and running around trying to find our two russian speaking comrades and/or english speaking locals. It eventually transpires that the scrap yard is some sort of holding tank because there’s not much room at the border itself. Estimated waiting time? 2 to 8 hours. We’ve been here 10 so far.

So the usual high jinks kicked off- we had a game of ‘smallinator’ (Frank Smalley asks a series of series questions about ITV1, sweets, Freddy Mercury etc, while we use gummi bears as playing pieces), space hopper headers and vollies and eventually the midlands mobile disco came into it’s own and we had a rave off. That passed a few hours.

Every couple of hours 5 cars at a time would be called forward (in crackly muffled Russian, which we eventually deciphed) to swap the small metal token for a small green piece of card.

More crackly russian finally informed us we could go back to the border, nearly 12 hours after we arrived. We’re still there now… and have been advised to switch phones off so i’m putting this thing away for a bit.

…riding in The Alliance at the mo and they’ve only got the V379- the temporary registration document.

“Where is the official document?”
“This is the official document, but it is temporary.”
“This is the end of the European Union, this is Russia.”
“Can we come in?”
“We will check. Wait.”


Estonian side:
“Your documents are fine. Proceed.”
Lets see what Russia say…

… It appears a few people have given up before the border and headed back to tallinn to get a ferry to ‘sinki. We’re ploughing on, well, we’ve been stationary on a bridge at 3am for the last half hour but we’re trying to…

… forms forms forms car search forms insurance … Just one more barrier …

Oh, the don’t like the temporary V5 again…

… And the final four have made it though!

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